Fixer Chao
Han Ong
The plot of Fixer Chao has the makings of a brainy blockbuster: In a sinister twist on Pygmalion, William Paulinha, a small-time hustler who's worked the men's rooms of Port Authority and the bars of Times Square is transformed into Master Chao, a chic and pricey Feng Shui consultant, invited into the homes of the Upper East Side's rich and famous. His Henry Higgins, a jealous writer who seeks revenge on the monied literary and cultural elite, is less than forthcoming about the extent of his plans for Master Chao, and William eventually discovers himself caught up in a web of blackmail and, ultimately, murder.
Alas, MacArthur Award-winning playwright Han Ong has written a debut novel that is easy to admire, but difficult to truly enjoy. There is no literary Feng Shui at work here. The book's spirit does not flow freely, but in awkward fits and starts. It is overstuffed with, well, stuff. While each piece of writerly craftwork and each shimmering intellectual objet d'art is individually fascinating, the overall result is a cluttered room.
Fixer Chao provocatively plumbs issues of ethnic, class and sexual identity while simultaneously serving up a deft critique of contemporary pop culture, not to mention a metafictional exploration of the structure and utility of mystery novels. But in the rarified air of Ong's far-reaching and admirable ambition, there's insufficient oxygen for his narrative to breathe.
While Fixer Chao will prove less than satisfying to readers in search of storytelling, the novel is nonetheless studded with sensitive, almost off-handedly gorgeous, observations, such as this fleeting observation on growing older in the city:
"The trees were greening once more. I had to stop every once in a while to admire a certain tree, remembering how it had hung limp and frightened during the winter, mirroring the postures of everyone. But it seemed like I was the only one doing this, the young people around us were busy ignoring everything natural, and seeing this made me realize that I had indeed walked over a line which demarcated not-youth from youth, and I realized further that I was not sad about this..."
The novel also offers ruthlessly funny set-pieces, attacking the sort of New Yorkers whose whole lives look like "House & Garden in the flesh." They babble at cocktail parties about which sort of "Third Worlders" make the best servants, and attend media-event awards ceremonies to honor the year's "Best Kiss in a Movie" and "Sexiest Album Cover." One character, a famous novelist who plays a key role in Ong's increasingly garbled storyline, is a devastating hybrid of Phillip Roth and Woody Allen on their worst days.
Throughout his debut, Ong proves himself a fine prose-smith. He demonstrates a fine facility with both big haunting themes and little zinging details. His stumbling block is the awkward blending of the two, which sometimes makes Fixer Chao feel like a wrestling match between Paul Auster and David Foster Wallace (with William Vollman as their grungy referree).
In spite of its flaws then, Fixer Chao is a harbinger of Ong's great potential as a novelist. This book alone contains enough potent core ideas for a full shelf's worth.
