Book Review: ‘Ghost Town,’ by Kevin Chen – The New York Times

GHOST TOWN, by Kevin Chen | Translated by Darryl Sterk

Kevin Chen’s “Ghost Town” is the literary equivalent of a suitcase jammed full to the point of bursting. Characters, memories, regrets, choices, consequences, secrets, history, politics, real estate, sex: They’re all pressed together close, like unwashed clothes after a long trip. Open the case up even a little bit and the dirty laundry starts spilling out.

The character at the center of it all is Keith Chen. He has just returned to Yongjing, the countryside town in Taiwan where he grew up, from Berlin, where, we learn early on, he served prison time for murder. In Yongjing, he heads to his childhood home, hoping to see as many of his four living siblings as possible. The perspective shifts among the siblings, plus the ghosts of other family members no longer living. The narration has an associative fluidity that mirrors, often to thrilling effect, the mechanics of memory, a common but elusive writerly target.

Each family member — “five elder sisters, one elder brother, a father who never talked, and a mother who never stopped” — along with many others, gets a back story. They unfold so quickly that they sometimes feel thin, more like bullet points than lives. There are sexual awakenings (Keith learns he is gay, for starters), sexual assaults, marriages, affairs, births, business schemes, political schemes, suicides, a police raid, escapes to the comforting big-city anonymity of Taipei — and, oh yeah, there’s that murder in Berlin.

Keith’s father goes into business with Jack Wang, a canny entrepreneur who sells rice crackers, and much else besides, in Taiwan and China. The Wangs back the mayoral campaign of Keith’s brother, Heath, in hopes he will favor them with construction contracts. Baron Wang, Jack’s son, builds a gaudy mansion in Yongjing and woos one of Keith’s sisters, then another. A different sister, Beverly, cranks out piecework sewing for international fashion brands.