Somewhere along the way, we decided there was nothing serious about having fun. We expect award winners to signal their importance with somberness. Stories that delight in playfulness—that sparkle with humor and shine with formal inventiveness—are rarely contenders for the Great American Novel. Thankfully, Charles Yu bucks the trend with the acclaimed and National Book Award–winning Interior Chinatown, which is filled with sharp satire, clever humor, and mind-bending ideas.
The novel is no anomaly in Yu’s oeuvre. Throughout his writing career, he has explored two sandboxes in particular: genre and form. Open a Charles Yu story and you might encounter anything from superheroes and zombies to dragons and detectives. But these characters will be remixed and infused with psychological depth, and their stories might be told in surprising literary forms such as an email chain, a multiple-choice test, or—in the case of Interior Chinatown—a screenplay. Perhaps we could combine genre and form to say that Yu’s work has long investigated storytelling and how the shape of our stories produces our reality. Metafiction, you might call what Yu writes. Though his metafiction is never mere cleverness for cleverness’s sake. His fiction asks, What do our methods of storytelling say about ourselves? Our culture? Our history?
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