The Annotated Nightstand: What Mike Fu is Reading Now, and Next

As Mike Fu’s novel Masquerade progresses, his protagonist Meadow Liu’s day-to-day becomes increasingly haunted. While digging around a friend’s sublet for something, he finds a book entitled The Masquerade from early 1930s Shanghai written by a man whose Chinese name is eerily similar to Meadow’s (Liu Tian). As the Fu’s novel continues, the line blurs between Meadow’s world and the fictional masked ball. Or, as our narrator explains, Meadow “blames the book for his state of affairs.” The state of Meadow’s affairs? After a decade in New York, “[How could] he have imagined when he first arrived that this was how things would turn out? Drinking alone in the home of a woman who has disappeared, living with her ghosts and her masks, while his own ghosts come back to haunt him.” It takes almost the entire book to comprehend, in some small part, the missing woman with whom he finds himself intensely connected, the ghosts, the masks, the found novel, the lost lover—the last decade of Meadow’s life. Suspense is “a state of agitation produced by the desire to know what the future holds. Because uncertainty is a fundamental part of the human condition, suspense is central to our emotional landscape,” writes Kathryn Schultz in a recent New Yorker article . “We can feel it about almost anything, at any scale of significance.” What is and isn’t a coincidence begins to dog Meadow for this very reason. With the end of every chapter in Masquerade comes a chronological leap, or perhaps into the pages of the mysterious novel. As soon as we think we have some sharpened edges of a figure or story line, Fu thrillingly zips our focus elsewhere. Yet some of the loveliest writing in the book lies in Fu’s descriptions of love and desire. The tenor of a touch, smelling a beloved’s pillow after he gets out of bed, sex that gives over to blissful exhaustion. “How delicious and thrilling the descent was,” Fu writes, “the body tumbling head over heels, metallic momentum in his belly.” In Masquerade , we have a fizzy cast of […]

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