dinburgh” is the kind of book that readers talk about in whispers and pass from hand to hand. I mean this literally, at least in my case: I found it, only a year or two after it came out, because my teacher, the poet Carl Phillips—I was doing an M.F.A. in poetry, in St. Louis—handed a copy to me and told me I had to read it right away. He never did this with any other book, and I didn’t waste any time doing as he said; and so the novel took its place, when I was twenty-three or twenty-four, in that private constellation that I looked to for guidance as I started out in a life in art-making. A point on an aesthetic compass.
What was that first encounter like? I remember the experience of the early pages as one of peculiarly intense disorientation and heat. The disorientation is easy to explain: Chee drops us right into the middle of things, and one of the book’s ambitions is to confound our notions of beginnings and ends. We know from the first words—“After he dies”—the fate of one of the novel’s main characters, though the details won’t arrive for seventy pages or so; soon we are deep in an account of generational trauma, the narrator’s family history of war and displacement (the narrator’s father is Korean, and his paternal grandparents live in his family home, in Maine); then we are immersed in myth, the story of a beautiful fox-demon who falls in love with a human man. Only after all this is a name finally attached to the voice we’ve been following: Aphias Zhe, though we will call him Fee, a nickname given to him by his best friend, Peter, the one we already know will die.
