Mike Fu’s debut novel Masquerade promises a hint of mystery, a hint of meta, and a hint of magic. The novel’s protagonist—aimless, lowkey, good-natured, late-twenties bartender Meadow Liu—is house- and plant-sitting for his elusive artist friend Selma as he recovers from a romantic ghosting. Then Selma disappears, Meadow finds a strange novel in her apartment, he drinks a lot, things get a bit wacky, and Meadow must, as the jacket copy puts it, “question everything he knows as the boundaries between real and imagined begin to blur.”
Masquerade does contain mystery (two disappearances), meta (a book within a book), and magic (one possibly-a-dream haunted mirror scene). But mostly, Masquerade is about the protagonist’s daily New York life: friends met, bars hopped, restaurant meals consumed, drugs taken, streets crossed, shifts worked, nights passed. No element of the backdrop is too small to be described, no afternoon uneventful enough to escape commentary. “Without time for a proper meal, Meadow grabs a pastry from a local coffee shop on his way to the C train and finishes it before he even reaches the subway station. Dinner can wait,” the narrator reports, as if we might be tracking Meadow’s food intake for the day, and would have quibbled a smash cut to Meadow’s destination that left the mystery of his afternoon sustenance unsolved.
There’s a quaint pleasure in reading of Meadow’s nightly outings, the sticky floors and sour beer-wafts of one bar after another after another, the impressions that traverse Meadow between waking and brewing coffee: “The grayness seeps into the air and weighs on his chest like a small animal. Monochrome and tasteless, the world is a can of soda gone flat. The only thing that inspires him to get dressed at all is a desire for coffee, which he eventually gets around to making with slow, plodding movements in the kitchen.” Meadow oscillates between vague malaise and vague optimism, beset here and there by a “mild disquiet,” a “dull ache,” an “irrational guilt.” The emotional register never quite peaks or plummets, because nothing bad ever happens: the meals are good, the friends are kind, the debauchery is tame, the hangovers are mitigable, the sex is sufficient, the consequences are gentle.
When the note of dread does sound—“[Selma] was looking straight at him now, but still yielded no reaction, as though she did not comprehend what was happening… Her slender fingers were icy to the touch”—the only way to sustain it is to abort and then avoid the scene in question, as any continuation inevitably resolves back to the major key. One and a half chapters after Meadow finds Selma catatonic, we learn that “it had taken [Selma] a minute to snap out of it, even after Meadow found her in the corner of the room… When she was fully responsive again, all she could say was that she had been exhausted from organizing the event.”
Many early-career writers make the mistake of protecting their characters from threat, both external (the world inflicts suffering on the characters) and internal (the characters inflict suffering on themselves and others). The standard prescription for this is to “add conflict,” which often results in writers tossing in arguments, miscommunications, gunshots, unforced errors, none of which have any lasting effect on the characters, who are shielded by the author’s affection from any unresolvable mistakes. Masquerade’s concession to the conflict problem is its premise: mystery, meta, magic, disappearances, ghosts, doppelgängers, subterfuge. And yet it’s obvious, page by harmonious page, that these were the aspects of the book that interested the author the least.
The operative mystery of the book is surprisingly scant. Selma, off at an artist residency in Shanghai, waits until halfway through the novel to properly disappear: “It’s been almost a week since anyone has seen or heard from Selma. Given the circumstances, we decided to file a missing persons report yesterday. I have just been informed by the investigating officer that they were able to gain entry to her residence and nothing appeared to be suspicious… It seems she got in a cab…” The next escalation takes place nearly a hundred pages later, when a drunken Meadow hears someone trying to enter his apartment and catches sight of Selma herself through the peephole—he intends to let her in, but gets sidetracked when he starts to vomit. After that, there’s no word of Selma until Meadow discovers a letter from her on the mail table in the apartment: “I write to you from northern China. Please excuse my abrupt disappearance. After I last saw you in Shanghai, I was overcome by the impulse to make this journey.” Selma’s fine, was never in danger to begin with, and if Meadow checked his mail more often, he could have solved Selma’s disappearance within a week or two of hearing about it.
The speculative and meta aspects are similarly negligible, dismissed alternately as dreams, coincidence, and paranoia. Everything, even Meadow’s ghosting by a promising new lover, gets a satisfying real-world explanation in the final pages of the novel. “‘So it all checks out in the end,’ Meadow says with resignation. All the turmoil he felt while reading The Masquerade, the paranoid headspace and the weird experiences at Selma’s, turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with this.”
The half-heartedness of these otherworldly inclusions led me to feel that Masquerade doesn’t quite know what it’s about. This is not a novel about Shanghai, or masks, or ghosts, or “strange happenings.” This is a novel about a disaffected Chinese-American New York transplant in his late twenties who needs to find some direction in life, and who, luckily, has the disposable funds and cadre of friends to help him figure it out.
“He would be thirty soon enough,” the narration reminds us. “And then what? Would he be able to curtail these unhealthy tendencies? Would he have someone to love?” These are the real questions of the novel—and they’re interesting, worthy questions, much worthier than speculation about a possibly fake book-within-a-book. Masquerade, pitched as a surreal mystery, reads instead like a memoir in disguise, like a sequence of artful diary entries, like a ghost story you might hear around a campfire that begins, “Okay, I’ve never actually seen a ghost, but this one time when I was staying at my friend’s apartment…”
Does Masquerade accomplish what it sets out to do? No, not at all; it falls short on many counts of its purported genre. And yet I suspect the fault lies with the goal more than with the attempt.
Mike Fu has a talent for character, for scene-setting, for vibrant description, and for capturing that particular time of life when the ride hasn’t stopped spinning yet, but it’s slowing down. I wished, reading Masquerade, that the pressures of marketability and originality hadn’t lured the author away from his strengths. The fact that Masquerade is a pleasant read is a testament to the real human story Mike Fu is trying to tell. Maybe it’s the fault of the publishing industry writ large that he had to work so hard to hide it.
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