Rental House by Weike Wang ( Riverhead Books)

On their way to Martha’s Vineyard where they’ll be steps away from the ocean in a cottage that has an extra bedroom for visitors, Nate and Keru have the sort of marriage everyone dreams of. Young professionals who live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, they’ve emerged from the isolation of the pandemic ready for a vacation. There’s only one glitch--their parents.

Both Nate and Keru are “first-gen” graduates of Yale. Nate is the son of rural parents who marvel that he’s made it “from Appalachia to the Ivy League,” or as Nate puts it “from white trash to the White House.” Keru is the only child of successful parents who immigrated from rural China when she was still a baby and who regard her as their “built-in translator.” While Nate’s parents feel dubious about Keru’s US citizenship, Keru’s parents treat Nate like “the store clerk at their favorite TJ Maxx, a person they recognized and smiled at.” 

Within the framework of this marriage, Weike Wang has created a scathing comedy of manners. Keru’s parents visit with their Chinese cultural standards unassailed by their American lives. Nate is told by his father-in-law that using a dishwasher is fine for him but not for Keru. “To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat.” Keru’s mother, while watching a TV program about upscale real estate transactions, remarks that “they make deals look too easy. Where’s the suffering?” 

When the votes are finally counted in the 2016 election, Nate is crushed by his parents’ choice of candidate while Keru’s mother points out that having a president in office for eight years is nothing compared to “an entire childhood spent under Chairman Mao.” 

When Keru first meets Nate’s parents, it’s at a Yale gathering where almost all of the mothers are garbed in floral print dresses and wearing floppy sun hats. “How do you tell any of them apart?” Keru asks Nate as they approach her future mother-in-law. She’s amazed at “how innocuous the conversation can get” and wonders if all white families chirp at each other “like a set of affable birds.”

As their parents age, Nate and Keru no longer have them as part of their vacation. Instead they meet a couple at an Adirondacks retreat who have come to New York from Romania. An affluent expat, the husband immediately offers up his Brooklyn zip code as a status marker and nods approvingly when Nate provides the one in which he and Keru live. Swiftly the Romanian couple establish their point of view--napping schedules are scrupulously adhered to when the wife is ovulating—and they identify Nate and Keru as DINKs, Double Income No Kids. The epithet becomes an attack on Nate and Keru’s enviable life as the Romanian husband advises them to become expats themselves. “Even a few months will give you a better perspective.”

If Jane Austen were alive in the 21st Century, this is the book that she might well have written. Satirical without carrying a vicious bite, Rental House is a novel that evokes startled laughter on one page and uncomfortable squirming on the next. Under Wang’s lens, marriage, families, race, and class are artfully dissected and recast in a different light, one that’s sometimes uncomfortable but been needed for a very long time.~Janet Brown