The Wound and the Show

Kat Tang’s debut, Five-Star Stranger, has a very bright and colorful dustjacket, but its less than effusive narrator, if not exactly unreliable, is not given to telling us what he’s feeling, and we sense that if we ever find out, somber tones will replace the nearly gaudy ones that first greeted us. He’s an actor of a sort, and definitely a dissembler. One has heard of people paid to mourn at funerals, and this is the kind of work Tang’s unnamed hero does, using an app called “Rental Stranger” on which people can hire him as a fake lover, friend, family member, etc., which takes him all over New York, including to a funeral in Brooklyn. The most fraught of his regular roles is that of husband to a woman named Mari, and father to her daughter Lily, which involves a complicated series of lies told to the credulous but rather watchful little girl. They live well uptown and Mari can barely afford his services; after a dinner by Chef Boyardee and cash for the overtime from a belated Mari, he takes the subway to the Upper West Side, where he rents a suit and finds his seat at a tony restaurant opposite a middle-aged woman, to whom he is to propose in the sightlines of the man, dining there with his wife, with whom she has been having an affair. Tang has taken some time to think through the uses such talents as her narrator’s could be put to, and through his particular professional difficulties. The purpose of the dinner is to show the man that the woman is an eligible bachelorette, eligible enough in fact to turn down this offer, and this makes the job trickier for the narrator, since “a rejected proposal was a tragicomedy that could make the rounds on the internet,” on video, and he needs anonymity to keep working.