It's funny, it's political and it's got heart.
What looks like a gimmick - being written in the form of a tv/film script - turns out not to be a gimmick at all, but instead a case of form serving content, as Interior Chinatown smoothly blurs the tv series in which Willis Wu performs and the 'real world' he lives in, which is in turn in service to the novel's wider points about the performativity and constructedness of racial identity and roles in America. And all of those formal and structural gambits somehow contrive to at least not obscure, and often illuminate, the human-ness of the stories that Yu is telling.
It's a breeze to read, and clearly deliberately so, and unabashed in being obvious about what it's saying about the (American) world and the experience of being an Asian male within it, as well as its prescriptions, and at the same time sophisticated and rich in insight. Quite an achievement. (Little wonder about this; its universality of appeal is striking.)
