Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen (W.W. Norton & Company)

Activities of daily living are how acuity and independence are measured in aging people. Can they manage their money, shop for groceries, do laundry? The list becomes more basic as time goes on. Can they bathe without help, get dressed in the morning, feed themselves three times a day? Are they able to go to the toilet alone? Do they know where they are? Can they recognize familiar faces?

It’s a heartbreaking litany of questions that Alice and her sister Amy ask themselves as the man they call The Father, whom  their mother married after her first husband abandoned his family,  loses his ability to do these things, gradually but with an alarming speed. Six months earlier he lived alone in the way he wanted, with “his standard meals of Fritos and pork rinds confettied with peanuts,” a bottle of Jim Beam, and two packs of cigarettes a day, sitting in front of his television watching Netflix.  In spite of this sustained physical abuse, “his lungs remained pink, his blood pressure and cholesterol levels normal. Just like they were now.” It’s The Father’s mind that’s shutting down. Eventually he’ll forget to breathe, just as he no longer remembers how to perform any other activity of daily living.

When Alice goes to The Father’s house, she’s surprised to discover he had been a man with projects. Old cameras and stacks of photographs, pieces of classical Chinese furniture that he has taught himself to build, a library of cookbooks: all bear testimony to an active mind which is lapsing into torpor. “Come on, brain,” Alice overhears The Father saying as he struggles to put on a pair of pants. 

Alice believes in projects. She lives in a community of artists and when they ask her what she's been up to, she tells them she’s working on a project, although it doesn’t yet exist outside of her head. Within her head she’s obsessed with a performance artist, a man who came to America from Taiwan as Alice, her mother, and sister did. 

Tehching Hsieh is bored with the activities of daily living, although his own are complicated by his status as an illegal alien. For Hsieh time is plastic, a substance to be molded in surreal ways. He selects the expanse of a year to spend or to waste in a matter of his own choosing, in enigmatic versions of his own daily activities. 

One year he builds a cage in his studio and lives in it for 365 days,  never leaving it, without speaking, reading,  writing or being amused by a radio or a television. A friend comes every day bringing food and removing his body waste. During this time he allows four showings, one for each season of the year. He follows this by putting a time clock in his studio and punching it every hour, on the hour, from  one April to the next, for a total of 8,627 punches. Twelve alarm clocks woke him every hour for a year, during which he missed only 133 punches of the clock. A few months after this piece, he lives outdoors with only a sleeping bag as shelter for a year that includes one of the coldest winters ever recorded in New York. The hardest part, Hsieh said, was staying clean; his hands became encrusted with dirt. His next piece involves another person, the artist Linda Montano to whom he is tethered by an 8-foot rope for a year, without ever touching each other. Only in sleep do the couple find privacy. Montano later admitted this piece was “dangerous emotionally.” As Hsieh said, they became each other’s cage.

Alice steeps herself in records of these pieces. She manages to find where Hsieh lives, not far from her own Brooklyn apartment. She spots him in a local supermarket and follows him to Italy where he represents Taiwan in the Venice Bienniale. She never speaks to him but his work becomes her life. 

“What is important for me is passing time, not how to pass time,” Hsieh has told interviewers. By making him her project, Alice passes time without needing to wonder how or why this is happening. But then The Father becomes the project and passing time takes on an unfamiliar urgency. 

Lisa Hsiao Chen uses the form known as autofiction and makes it a work of performance art. There is no plot and no resolution. Although The Father’s decline is the pivot point of the novel, it doesn’t provide a narrative arc. Neither does Tehching Hsieh, a living artist who exists outside of fiction, whose final performance was thirteen years of making no art at all. https://www.tehchinghsieh.net/ Nor does Alice, who ends the book with a single question: “Will there be another project?”

Although this novel floats like a dream drifting through a heavy mist, it’s weighted with the unspoken questions that lie below its surface. Chen is a writer who catches ordinary life and places it in sentences of amazing beauty--”It was late spring; the days molted with gold.” She explores ideas of time and mortality through glimpses of Simone de Beauvoir and Henri Bergson. She investigates the amorphous nature of friendship in modern kinetic lives. She offers up hundreds of thoughts that are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, leaving it to her readers to assemble them into a whole that will make personal sense for each one of them. She's written a book that might never have been written before. Read it.~Janet Brown