A Review of Neel Patel’s Tell Me How to Be (Flatiron, 2021)
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ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
I had meant to read this book long ago, but I actually lost it in a cross-country move. I eventually got my hands on another copy, so I can rectify my oversight. Neel Patel’s Tell Me How to Be (Flatiron, 2021) is one of those books that I would have written on awhile back had it come out sooner. The novel is especially important because it reminds us of the complicated contours of the queer Asian American experience, especially in relation to transnational dynamics and family formations. Let’s let B&N give us more context: “Renu Amin always seemed perfect. But as the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death approaches, she is binge-watching soap operas and simmering with old resentments. She can’t stop wondering if, thirty-five years ago, she chose the wrong life. In Los Angeles, her son, Akash, has everything he ever wanted, but he is haunted by the painful memories he fled a decade ago. When his mother tells him she is selling the family home, Akash returns to Illinois, hoping to finally say goodbye and move on. Together, Renu and Akash pack up the house, retreating further into the secrets that stand between them. Renu sends an innocent Facebook message to the man she almost married, sparking an emotional affair that calls into question everything she thought she knew about herself. Akash slips back into bad habits as he confronts his darkest secrets—including what really happened between him and the first boy who broke his heart. When their pasts catch up to them, Renu and Akash must decide between the lives they left behind and the ones they’ve since created, between making each other happy and setting themselves free. By turns irreverent and tender, filled with the beats of ’90s R&B, Tell Me How to Be is about our earliest betrayals and the cost of reconciliation. But most of all, it is the love story of a mother and son each trying to figure out how to be in the world.”
This particular description is fairly robust, and I don’t need to add too much more general information. The one thing that it really misses is the interesting discursive mode, as Patel chooses to use alternating first person perspectives, shifting between the aforementioned Renu and Akash. I’m always a huge fan of the first person, but Patel doesn’t necessarily give you characters that you can just sit by and observe. Indeed, I read Patel’s story collection, If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, and Patel always retains these fairly strident first person perspectives. These characters are fully formed and exhibit both strengths and major flaws, so they can be a lot. This novel is no different. For instance, Akash is pretty messy: he has some substance abuse problems, he’s pretty flaky, he’s broke, and he keeps a lot of secrets. While Akash’s mother clearly has more of her life put together, she has her own issues, living in an area with a majority-white community and the fact that she is grappling with a major move to London. Renu has her own secret as well, so you might conceive of this novel as one involving comparative “closets,” with Akash being queer and his mother having a still-burning love for a Muslim man in her past. The novel works best as Patel’s incisive indictment of transnational Asian American parents, who no doubt have many things that they keep from their children. The novel unmasks the hypocrisy potentially existing within the Asian American parental structure, which can produce heteronormative relationship standards that are not only destructive but do not acknowledge relational forms of queerness existing even in seemingly heterosexual relationships. On the level of plot, the novel occasionally suffers from periodic dips in momentum, but Patel ultimately knows that what progresses the narrative is the dissonant and synergistic nature of these various relationships.
Buy the Book Here
comments
ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
I had meant to read this book long ago, but I actually lost it in a cross-country move. I eventually got my hands on another copy, so I can rectify my oversight. Neel Patel’s Tell Me How to Be (Flatiron, 2021) is one of those books that I would have written on awhile back had it come out sooner. The novel is especially important because it reminds us of the complicated contours of the queer Asian American experience, especially in relation to transnational dynamics and family formations. Let’s let B&N give us more context: “Renu Amin always seemed perfect. But as the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death approaches, she is binge-watching soap operas and simmering with old resentments. She can’t stop wondering if, thirty-five years ago, she chose the wrong life. In Los Angeles, her son, Akash, has everything he ever wanted, but he is haunted by the painful memories he fled a decade ago. When his mother tells him she is selling the family home, Akash returns to Illinois, hoping to finally say goodbye and move on. Together, Renu and Akash pack up the house, retreating further into the secrets that stand between them. Renu sends an innocent Facebook message to the man she almost married, sparking an emotional affair that calls into question everything she thought she knew about herself. Akash slips back into bad habits as he confronts his darkest secrets—including what really happened between him and the first boy who broke his heart. When their pasts catch up to them, Renu and Akash must decide between the lives they left behind and the ones they’ve since created, between making each other happy and setting themselves free. By turns irreverent and tender, filled with the beats of ’90s R&B, Tell Me How to Be is about our earliest betrayals and the cost of reconciliation. But most of all, it is the love story of a mother and son each trying to figure out how to be in the world.”
This particular description is fairly robust, and I don’t need to add too much more general information. The one thing that it really misses is the interesting discursive mode, as Patel chooses to use alternating first person perspectives, shifting between the aforementioned Renu and Akash. I’m always a huge fan of the first person, but Patel doesn’t necessarily give you characters that you can just sit by and observe. Indeed, I read Patel’s story collection, If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, and Patel always retains these fairly strident first person perspectives. These characters are fully formed and exhibit both strengths and major flaws, so they can be a lot. This novel is no different. For instance, Akash is pretty messy: he has some substance abuse problems, he’s pretty flaky, he’s broke, and he keeps a lot of secrets. While Akash’s mother clearly has more of her life put together, she has her own issues, living in an area with a majority-white community and the fact that she is grappling with a major move to London. Renu has her own secret as well, so you might conceive of this novel as one involving comparative “closets,” with Akash being queer and his mother having a still-burning love for a Muslim man in her past. The novel works best as Patel’s incisive indictment of transnational Asian American parents, who no doubt have many things that they keep from their children. The novel unmasks the hypocrisy potentially existing within the Asian American parental structure, which can produce heteronormative relationship standards that are not only destructive but do not acknowledge relational forms of queerness existing even in seemingly heterosexual relationships. On the level of plot, the novel occasionally suffers from periodic dips in momentum, but Patel ultimately knows that what progresses the narrative is the dissonant and synergistic nature of these various relationships.
Buy the Book Here
comments
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