Book review of Memory Piece by Lisa Ko

In her first novel since her National Book Award-longlisted debut, The Leavers, Lisa Ko explores reminiscence, artwork, expertise and consumption via the eyes of three childhood finest pals. Jackie, Ellen and Giselle meet at Chinese college in suburban New Jersey within the Eighties. Though they arrive from completely different backgrounds and have divergent pursuits, they’re drawn collectively by a shared want to make one thing extra—or completely different—of their lives. Moving from the dot-com period and early tech tradition of the Nineteen Nineties to a extremely militarized imaginative and prescient of New York City within the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the methods the three girls’s lives converge and diverge.

Giselle turns to artwork, launching her profession with an experimental efficiency piece through which she lives for a yr in a hidden room in a mall. As she turns into extra immersed within the artwork world, she begins to query her motives and wishes, floundering via a life that’s generally extra show than substance. Jackie will get caught up within the early days of the web, working for a tech startup by day and creating her personal radical tasks by evening. Ellen turns into an activist in faculty, and devotes her life to group organizing and preventing towards the gentrification threatening her residence. 

The novel’s three distinct sections drive residence simply how in another way Giselle, Jackie and Ellen interact with and react to the world—and one another—as all the things adjustments round them. Jackie’s part is full of frenetic power, whereas Giselle’s is dreamy and quiet: Her voice comes via at a take away, as if she’s narrating from a distance. Ellen’s part is poignant with loss and nostalgia. Throughout, Ko’s prose is gorgeous and sharp, and her capacity to shapeshift via a variety of tones makes the novel a pleasure to learn.

A bittersweet wistfulness permeates the entire of Memory Piece. Though Giselle, Jackie and Ellen stay essential to at least one one other all through their lives, there’s a separateness to every of the novel’s sections that provides it a meandering and melancholy really feel. This is a compelling, typically chilling and fantastically observant novel about what connects us to, and disconnects us from, one another.