Keru and Nate just might be my spirit animals.
In Weike Wang’s “Rental House,” readers are invited into the lives of Keru (“like Peru”) and Nate, an interracial couple that met each other at a Halloween party in college and never looked back. Both considering themselves outsiders to their environment, they were drawn together by a shared social awkwardness that neither seemed to mind having.
We first meet the duo on their way to a Cape Cod rental they’ve grabbed for a month, sharing time with both sets of parents, in consecutive visits. First comes Keru’s parents, still adhering to pandemic standards and then some — a little over the top, but a lot of us were washing our groceries when the whole thing started, so … It’s an old-school duo, these two. Insanely high expectations of their only child, and simultaneously suspect of and subservient to Nate’s role as Keru’s husband.
Then come Nate’s parents — MAGA leaning, unsure of where Nate’s ambition to go to an Ivy League school came from when he would have been just fine spending his life in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and wishing he would have been a lawyer instead of a college faculty scientist. (Because his brother sure could use one once in a while, according to his mother.) It’s nearly impossible for either set of parents not to be offensive — and from it, some intense storytelling about family dynamics is born.
The second half of the book comes with a five-year fast-forward — Keru has been wildly successful at her consultant career while Nate is treading water with his. It’s fine, he’s fine, really. He doesn’t mind that his wife is the breadwinner, really. She doesn’t mind that she is stuck as a singleton child with caring for her aging parents, really. A second trip, this time to the Catskills, is a reckoning for both Nate and Keru as they wrestle with who they are and who they want to be — only to be interrupted by Nate’s wayward brother.
It’s a book that’s going to hit differently for a lot of people, with any number of different threads to pull — choosing childlessness, prioritizing careers, pet management, parent management, family communication in general, and life expectations. All in a tightly written, very entertaining 213 pages.
A great book club choice, too. Would love to know what other people think when it comes to Keru’s actions when stressed out. Badass? Or nervous breakdown? You be the judge.
LitzyDitz 