Book Review: Rental House

Riverhead Books

It is not often an author is able to write mundane, relatively normal people leading relatively normal lives in a way that pulls you in from the first chapter, but Weike Wang excels in this style and has done it again in her latest novel, Rental House.

The novel follows a young married couple, Keru and Nate, who met in college and married despite their very different familial backgrounds — Keru's parents are Chinese immigrants for whom perfection is the only goal, while Nate's parents are rural, white, working-class folks who do not see eye-to-eye with his ambitions.

The story unfolds over the course of two vacations, five years apart — the first in which Keru and Nate's parents separately visit a Cape Cod bungalow where the couple are staying (one parental group leaving before the other arrives), and a second in which the couple vacation alone in the Catskills.

The stark differences between the parents is immediately noticeable — Keru's parents are cautious in a post-COVID world, taking as many precautions as possible, while Nate's family operates in a way that, at times, can seem reckless. With both Keru and Nate struggling to maintain their strained relationships with their own parents, they also have to contend with the difficulties of trying (and ultimately failing) to relate to their in-laws.

Their second vacation, alone in the Catskills, introduces a new strain on their relationship when they're interrupted by multiple outsiders, including an Eastern European couple staying nearby as well as Nate's brother and his girlfriend showing up unannounced.

Wang excellently blends the mundanity of these vacations with the internal struggle each of the characters feels — Keru's struggle as an immigrant who came to the U.S. as a child, Nate's struggle of wanting to intellectually better himself, and the struggle of both when dealing with their parents and the outsiders who disrupt the flow of their lives. 

224 pages // Riverhead Books // Contemporary Fiction