Real Americans by Rachel Khong

Editorial Assistant Book Club: May 2024

Step 1: Forget What You’ve Been Told

It has been, without exaggeration, a few weeks, maybe months, since I’ve read a contemporary published book from start to finish. Although the exercise with the Editorial Assistant Book Club is generally to choose something off the beaten path and not a bestseller (i.e. publishing famous, not famous famous), Real Americans by Rachel Khong has an interesting publishing backstory that makes it a worthy case study.

Khong wrote a widely regarded novel Goodbye, Vitamin back in 2017 that was praised everywhere and decently commercially successful. Real Americans exemplifies a classic situation of an author that’s trying to take the jump from successful to big bestseller. I recall Real Americans being a highly sought after book when it was on submission with more than a dozen interested editors. It eventually sold to Knopf—the most prestigious publisher there is—for a lot of money, and was subsequently given the “big book” treatment (which worked in some regard, it was chosen as the Read With Jenna pick, one of the most reliable individual drivers of sales). Creatively, Real Americans is also a more ambitious venture for Khong, whose first novel was a slim, journal-like style of a first-person narrative about one woman and her family. Real Americans widens the scope considerably: a multigenerational, three timeline and three POV family epic.

After knowing all of this publishing history, the first goal is to try to leave all of this baggage at the door before picking up Real Americans. Remembering that the vast majority of readers don’t care who edited a book, rarely who published it, and certainly not what a publisher paid for it. If you start judging a book that way, you’ll never answer the more important questions: Do I like this? Does this book make me feel something? Does it make me think? What interesting choices did the writer make? How is it constructed? The same truth applies to critic or reader reviews. Factoring in what so-and-so thought or what fans are saying is a major distraction to figuring out a book yourself. Plus, you can always bring the messy stuff and outside context back in after you’ve finished reading and made up your own mind—Why did publishing people flip over this? How did this sell a bazillion copies? Etc.

With that tremendous amount of throat clearing out of the way, and divorcing our mind of expectations vs. execution, let’s dive into Real Americans.

The Hardest Thing to Do

Real Americans is a three act, three-character novel. The first two acts are great. The third and final act, sadly, more or less falls apart. It is important to start at the end because the ways in which the novel digresses from what worked so well throws into starker contrast what an accomplishment the first parts are. For the majority of the book Khong is doing what is possibly the hardest task in fiction (besides writing a great collection of short stories): writing an engrossing literary novel with functionally no plot or tension.

Real Americans starts with what has officially become a new time period of historical fiction: the 1990s. There has been a discernible shift, which Real Americans can be counted as part of, in how this decade is rendered in fiction. Just like with older time periods (the 60s, the 70s), cultural signifiers of the 90s and aughts are now used as a way to ground the place, carrying all of their implied assumptions with them, rather than coming out naturally in the wash like they do in contemporary fiction. For example, The Matrix is mentioned on the first page of Real Americans— CD mixtapes and a fancy new flat screen television both figure into the plot of act one. And, this is no spoiler, 9/11, as previously discussed on Dear Head of Mine is an event that can’t be and isn’t ignored as a plot point.  Doubly so, because Real Americans starts out in a familiar setting: New York City, where Lily Chen a second-generation Chinese American has come from her middle-class family to make it in magazine publishing in the big city.

The crux of this first section is a love story, sort of patterned and toned like an old school 90s rom-com. Lily meets Matthew, a tall and handsome, wealthy relative of her boss. The story starts out fairly contained in their courtship and you can see how Khong’s experience writing her first novel carried over to the second. There’s a whiff of wish fulfillment about this plot. All of Lily’s ills — which mostly have to do with money — are solved by having a nice, funny, charming, and rich boyfriend. But it sure is a joy to watch their relationship grow and see Lily contend with the corrosive ease of wealth, privilege, and whiteness that Matthew affords her.

In the age where so many writers maintain a relatively sparse and straightforward prose style, it can be hard to pin down what makes Khong’s writing special, especially as you sink into reading—the surest sign that this style of writing is working really well. What stands out, especially after reading the final act (we’ll get to that), is that Khong is adept at taking the ordinary, keeping it fluid, but knowing exactly which places to pause and where to flourish. The courtship between Lily and Matthew is particularly strong, capturing the playfulness of two people falling in love:

“It doesn’t matter to me who your family is. Okay? I don’t care about—” Here I gestured all around: the room, the ocean. “I couldn’t care less about any of this. I care about you—knowing you. Anyway it’s fine. They seem nice.”

“They can be very charming when they want to be,” Matthew said.

“I won’t be charmed if you don’t want me to be.”

[End Scene]

The dialogue is natural but charming, and Khong displays knack over and over again for picking the right line to end on. There are also the little choices in construction, like describing the whole view as “the room, the ocean,” giving the reader exactly what they need while keeping a nice feeling of movement to the scene. Here’s another example where Khong captures the playful banter of two teenage characters, and again ends the scene again at the exact right moment:

“How’s it going? We watched Die Hard.”

“People always call Die Hard a Christmas movie,” Timothy said. “But arguably it’s a Hanukkah movie. About persistence in the face of oppression.”

“Yeah. Okay. We saw it for the Hanukkah reason.”

 Timothy inhaled loudly. “Come over tomorrow? There’s something you should see.”

“What is it?”

“Just come over.”

[End Scene]

Like in many literary novels there are some family secrets in Real Americans that must be uncovered. What’s most impressive is that Khong’s observations of person and place, and her pure ability to write clean, intriguing sentences are often have a more powerful pull than the family mystery.

The Disease of Comparison

A concept I’m interested in as an editor is The Disease of Comparison. This comes into play anytime a writer offers two or more of something— two characters, two points of view, two settings (or in the grander scheme, two books). Invariably the reader then finds themselves comparing and finding one to be more lacking, no matter how good the writer is. It makes the creative choice to bifurcate the point of view or timeline inherently riskier and more difficult to pull off. This is not, however, the disease Real Americans suffers from.

The third and final perspective of the novel doesn’t suffer from comparison as much as a departure in style and mode of storytelling. If part one is near historical fiction set in the late 90s/early 2000s, then the final part is much closer to a traditional historical novel as we revisit the full story of Lily’s mother in communist China. On paper this should be the most compelling story, it’s the perspective with the highest stakes — communist China under Mao was a much more difficult circumstance than living on minimum wage in the East Village in the 90s — and it also has such potential as the storyline that promises to tie the other two parts together in dramatic fashion.

The issue is that this pure historical fiction set in China as opposed to milieu the author is probably more familiar with — New York in the aughts, Yale — made the sentence by sentence telling more wooden. Although Lily’s mother is a highly educated scientist, she gets to experience none of witty repertoire of the later generations of Chens. What was hard to place as to why the pages were flying in act one and act two becomes so apparent when act three rolls around. Act three is removed in comparison to the first two, and is the type of historic fiction that comes from history books rather than personal history.  

The final third also throws the superstructure of the book into question. The structure of the novel is 2-3-1, we get the middle generation’s and youngest generation’s stories first, followed by the oldest generation (the first chronologically). In this type of structure the mystery becomes: how does the older perspective reframe what we learned in the first two-thirds of the novel. The problem is that we don’t learn much of anything that redefines our understanding of the characters who we’ve followed. Maybe we learn that the two younger generations should be more grateful for the sacrifice of those before them— but that’s both not very revelatory or really a theme that the novel is looking to explore elsewhere.

The broad themes of the novel aren’t nearly as interesting as the interpersonal relationships of Lily or her son. The main plot revolves around a rich white family who own a pharmaceutical giant and genetics research company. With that, you might be able to guess some of the bigger issues the novel tries to contend with. As Khong tries to land this plane, exploring three generations of inherited racial wealth vs. inherited racial trauma, it gets a bit wobbly on both the micro and macro level. When things fall apart in fiction, they fall apart quickly. What were intricate stylistic choices become block letter messages— hitting us on the nose in a rush to tie together the big themes whereas Khong’s mastery is in small moments. Here is the description of one of the pharma guys late in the novel (unrelated to the family), that without spoiling anything gives a taste of this departure:

“His feet are on his desk, the soles of his sneakers clean, the shoes pure white—they can’t possibly have been walked in—and his phone is in his hand, a colorful game on the screen that Nick knows is a knockoff version of Settlers of Catan, called Colonizer.”

What This Means for Khong Next

Now back to the outside forces. Clearly Khong took a giant leap with this novel in her career and as a writer. It was an instant New York Times bestseller. Hell, most readers might like the bigger, bolder obviousness of the final act according to the Goodreads ratings. It’s a reminder of a common theme of Dear Head of Mine, which is that while canonized literature is a pristine thing to be studied, publishing is a messy business to be experienced. Nothing is perfect. Loving the vast majority of a book is a good reason to read and recommend it. As far as paying a million dollars to edit it? Definitely. If you’re not using your own money.