Clam Down: A Metamorphosis
I can’t remember being as completely surprised by a book in a long time. Probably not since Catherine Lacey’s devastatingly inventive Biography of X. Every few chapters, Clam Down veers into another area of cultural, historical or scientific exploration. You might speed through this book, absolutely eager to see what other surprising areas of inquiry pop up ... The most moving part of the book is Chen’s evolving relationship with her emotionally distant father, whose life’s work was building a computer program called, wait for it, Shell Computing ... A balm for our algorithmically determined lives; it’s not feeding us what we already want, it’s delivering on what we didn’t know we needed.
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To tell her story, she must tell her dad’s; and she does this masterfully, with a novelist’s ability to enter another person’s head ... Chen’s rendering of a certain kind of Taiwanese American dad is almost painfully accurate: the blend of petty criticism and implicit affection, aggravated and funny at the same time ... These are poignant, sometimes tragic glimpses of a life. But they also read as strikingly fresh—a record of an interior experience rarely seen in American letters ... The story it tells, of emotional change and growth, is a human one—which is precisely what makes it so moving.
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A poignant and wholly original memoir of liberation through confinement ... a dreamlike, albeit carefully studied, tale exploring introversion, hardening one’s exterior as a means of self-protection and reliance ... The book drags a bit, yet it pays off as Chen, ultimately, steps into her own voice with a greater understanding of healing.
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