No one picks up a novel about divorce and cancer expecting levity. And yet, contra its unwieldy title, “Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar,” Katie Yee’s buzzy debut is startlingly fleet. “A lot of my writing process was Googling ‘minimum words for a novel?’ over and over again,” the author joked in a recent interview. The draft she submitted to her agent was 40,000 words; the final product weighs in at 199 pages soaking wet. It’s perfect for reading one-handed on the subway, consumed in the spare minutes between stops.
The narrative is made up of loosely structured prose fragments — rarely longer than a page or two — in the vein of Renata Adler and Jenny Offill. It’s a formal approach that once signified ambitious experimentalism, has since been derided by Joyce Carol Oates (with the unforgettable phrase “wan little husks”) and these days feels like the default mode of a certain kind of literary fiction. Unlike those earlier books, which tended to feel austere, almost prosecutorial, in their attitude toward their subjects, “Maggie” (if I may) is primarily comic. Recalling the dinner when her husband, Sam, disclosed his affair, the unnamed narrator says: “I should have known something was up. But the restaurant we were at was actually an all-you-can eat buffet, so one can imagine the excitement that blinded me.” Her response to this marital bombshell? “I’m having seconds.”
When, some days later, she starts to feel an ache in her chest, “solid as stone,” the narrator’s best friend tells her that she’s manifesting her pain. It turns out to be a real tumor in her right breast. Puckishly, she calls it Maggie, after the woman Sam is sleeping with. The novel hazily sketches the trajectories of the narrator’s medical treatment and her breakup, interspersed with her musings on parenting and her Chinese heritage. Alone in her empty apartment, she speaks out loud to her cancer about what red wine to open, whether to run the dishwasher. She also imagines bequeathing to the human Maggie a guide to her husband, with a rundown of how cold he likes to keep the house and a surefire way to win a fight (saying: “That’s so funny. Your dad was just saying something like that the other day.”).
Yee’s prose has a meandering, conversational rhythm, and reading “Maggie” feels pleasurably like clicking through the back archives of a webcomic or lingering over lunch wine with an old friend. As with Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn” — a comparison invited by the publisher on the back cover — you read “Maggie” to spend time with its author. But where Ephron’s narrator plants a rumor that her romantic rival has a venereal disease, Yee’s contents herself with meticulously photoshopping Maggie into her wedding photos. And where Ephron’s narrator was powered by an acrid, delicious hostility, Yee’s sensibility is gentle.
That gentleness yields, peculiarly, a cancer novel without physicality and a divorce novel without conflict. The narrator glosses over radiation and surgery; she never discusses her pain and barely mentions physical discomfort. As for the marriage, it dissolves quietly. The narrator and her husband don’t fight over anything — not alimony (“generous”), not custody (shared, without complaint), not how and where the romance died. The characters all behave freakishly well, infidelity aside. When the ex-mother-in-law calls to make vacation arrangements, she speaks decorously. When Sam proposes that he, the narrator and his new flame grab a beer sometime, she says yes. They even play Jenga together.
We get indications that the narrator is a person hidden from herself: She describes how, in childhood, she learned “to live outside my body,” and she realizes she must have cried about her husband only when she finds a wad of tissue in her pocket. But it’s risky to design a novel featuring all these gaps, like air pockets keeping it afloat. If punctured by a stray question — e.g., “Does this person have a job?” or “Hold on, who’s paying the mortgage if Sam’s letting her keep the house?” — the whole narrative might collapse.
At one point, the narrator amuses herself by coming up with a pitch for a children’s book: “a company that charges you an exorbitant fee and stores your humor for you. Saves it for a rainy day, when it might be better appreciated.” “Maggie” gives a sense of talent kept in reserve for some other, later occasion — of an author wary of spending it all in one place. I hope Yee opens the vault. The clouds look heavy these days.
Sophia Nguyen is the news and features writer for Book World.
