Taipei Troubles
The Foreigner
by Francie Lin
(Picador, 2008)
Ahhh, the deadly trap of the first person narrative! Francie Lin has chosen a forty-year-old, first-generation virginal Chinese bachelor named Emerson as the voice of her debut novel, The Foreigner. All Lin’s and our hopes are in Emerson’s naïve hands. Unfortunately, Emerson is also not the sharpest tool in the shed. God help us all!
Thankfully, Lin knows how to write. There are some terrific gritty descriptions of Taipei and Lin handles scenes of violence and action quite deftly. And best of all, she shows promise as a writer who knows how to make stuff happen in a novel. There’s very little navel-gazing in The Foreigner, a common misstep in first person narratives. Lin juggles lots of balls with this novel and, by novel’s end, she catches all of them. There’s the unexpected death of Emerson’s mother, the surprise clause in the will that gives Emerson’s brother, Little P, the Bay Area family home (a love motel), and Emerson’s decision to travel to Taipei to find his missing brother and convince him to turn over the love motel to him (though Emerson is too sentimental to use it for his own love connections). Then, there is the subsequent mystery of Little P and the nature of his crime connections. And finally, the burning question -- will Emerson finally get laid?
Little P is bad news, but Emerson is too lost in the fog of his mother’s death and sentimental images of his brother as a little boy sleeping with his stuffed animals to see that Little P has become involved with a kidnapping/prostitution ring and has lots of blood on his hands. In spite of his handicaps, Emerson makes some good decisions by befriending Atticus, Grace and Angel and our hopes are kept alive that he will wise up and get out of Taipei while he’s maimed but not yet in a coffin. And, by the way, thank goodness for Lin’s naming scheme to tip us off to who is good and who is bad; hint: anyone with an initial in their name or who uses a nickname is very bad. For most of the novel, I found myself not-too-irritated by Emerson, but then he decides to carry his mother’s cremated remains in a purse that hangs from his neck. Not only is this overkill on the Oedipus complex metaphor, but it reads like a clumsy attempt to give a comic crime novel deeper meaning, and its just too plain creepy for this reader.
At novel’s end, Emerson heads off into his future, thankfully, sans purse, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The adventure is over, all the story’s balls, though fumbled, have been caught, and there’s a new novelist on the scene who shows promise. She just needs to beware the first person narrative - failings in that character can kill even the best of stories.