Review: "Chemistry" by Weike Wang

Chemistry, the debut novel from Weike Wang is the most assured, confident and fully formed debut novel I will read all year. It is short and sweet at an easy 211 pages, but none of those are filled with any kind of disposable fat. Everything found on the page is important and integral to the ideas the book puts forth, much like the numbers in an equation or the steps in an experiment. Reading it (which is rather quick and not just due to the page length), I was reminded of other great debuts of the past few years, thoughts that bring with them good and bad qualities. This is the kind of debut novel that announces itself loudly and proudly: both an eloquently written account of a messy life and keen presentation on how a unique individual surveys their surroundings and deals with their problems, which are of both the interior and exterior variety. I was reminded of self-assured debuts as varied as Teju Cole’s Open City and Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, all three compact, tightly woven stories that give a fascinating glimpse into the minds of their original protagonist (and the other two besides this novel having won the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction). But also, all three of these books hint that there is very little left in the creative well after finishing. They say seemingly everything the author needs to say, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Wang doesn’t produce another novel, or at least one quite so soon after this. At the center of this cerebral novel is an unnamed PhD student in chemistry at a prestigious school in Boston (which is likely Harvard given Wang’s credentials) who’s ordered life begins to unravel once her boyfriend Eric proposes to her. The novel is loosely structured as our narrator tries to make sense of the world and her own burgeoning unhappiness, and the book shifts rather sporadically between past and present, where we learn about our narrator’s troubled relationship with her immigrant parents and the their cruel pragmatic cynicism toward life and work, her history with Eric, whose little quirks about music and science widen the gulf between the couple as well as her attempts to get back on her feet after she quits the PhD program in dramatic fashion. In between these varied vignettes are little tidbits of scientific history, such as a few pieces on Marie Curie, a few Chinese proverbs and our narrator’s own interpretations of such themes. While it is a bit more lighthearted than Open City and The Yellow Birds, it doesn’t shy away from darker themes of loneliness and the ephemeral nature of romantic love, characterized by the narrator’s best friend’s volatile marriage and pregnancy, ending rather abruptly on the cusp of what could be the deepening or the alleviation of our narrator’s depression. This is the kind of debut novel I seek out throughout the year as long as I am reading something, a book filled with a ferocious energy whose odd world becomes something poetic and moving through the skilled and knowledgeable hands of wise beyond their years writer. 
Rating: 5/5