Celeste Ng imagines a present-day—or near present-day—dystopia in Our Missing Hearts, where a wrenching economic depression in the U.S. has revved up government surveillance of its own citizens to a fever of paranoia. Ng’s portrayal of this America recalls Stalin’s Soviet Union where citizens are rewarded for informing on neighbors. And for good measure she overlays that chilling memory with the contemporaneous and sinister ethnic hatred which infected Nazi Germany. This is the ghastly backdrop for Ng’s powerful novel, in which courage, the power of words, and the importance of memory provide their countervailing force. This book is gritty, hauntingly effective, and beautiful.
As we meet Bird, he’s just entering junior high in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He lives in a high-rise dormitory on the campus of a famous university with his father, Ethan Gardner. Ethan shelves books at the library, but used to be a lecturer in linguistics. He has plummeted in the workplace and in society’s esteem, because an innocuous nature poem published by his wife Margaret Miu becomes the focus of resistance to the government’s institutionalized ethnic hatred.
With strong curiosity and a growing sense of his mother’s soul, Bird runs away to New York to find her, following clues as well as any detective. This quest shows courage and resourcefulness, and is told in fairy tale terms, complete with a beautiful, enchanted queen, and a counterbalancing shocking violence. The climax, with its pervasive and stunning act of resistance, ranks as one of the most powerful fictional episodes in my memory. It is a testament to the power of storytelling and memory, particularly when the story being told carries moral weight. Oh, take up this book for its ultra-worthy and reverberant climax.
Needless to say, you won’t pick up this book for a neat-and-tidy ending; there’s no pretty bow to untie and store away. For this is a book that hits modern society hard, and highlights in bright relief the need, the desperate requirement, for connection and understanding.
And it’s a good thing, too, because when we meet this protagonist, he pines for the woman who has figuratively sent him packing. He takes more than his share of abuse from her; she has spent years in a relationship with him because she’s aware that he has money—how much money she isn’t too clear on, and that’s probably a good thing, too. But Gil is an unusual case: his parents die in a car crash when he’s ten, so before he comes—completely unexpectedly—into his inheritance at 18, he was shunted from relative to uncaring relative. During this period he had nothing. Gil arrives in the desert friendless, without an agenda for his life, and nearly devoid of self-esteem. Without overtly articulating it, he needs to grow, he longs for it.
He sets out to do something after he leaves New York. He volunteers at a home for abused women, takes a benevolent interest in his next-door neighbor’s two children, and stalks the heinous man who illegally hunts raptor birds. Eventually he becomes entangled in a complicated romantic situation, fraught with secrets, during which his motivations and actions center around the interests of the others involved. He remains unselfish to the core.
In this sweet, subtle novel, Gil’s motivation and his growth hold center stage; these features hold, and eventually gratify, our rooting sympathies.
Yet again Millet holds our interest and attention. And especially our hearts. She proves her versatility, her wisdom, and her moral compass yet again to her appreciating audience. This one is definitely recommended.
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