Publishers Weekly
★ 02/28/2022
Chen wows in this tender debut novel (after the poetry collection Mouth) about an Asian American woman caring for her ailing white stepfather while working on a study of Tehching Hsieh, the Taiwanese performance artist best known for his durational performances. Alice, a 39-year-old video editor, pushes pause on the Hsieh project after her unnamed stepfather—a retired carpenter and Vietnam vet with a passion for Chinese furniture—begins to exhibit signs of dementia. She and her sister Amy prepare to put his house up for sale so he can afford a care facility near Amy’s home in San Jose, Calif., which involves selling off and hauling away his treasured belongings and enduring heartbreaking bouts of his illness-fueled rage. To cope, Alice returns to Hsieh’s transgressive work, such as the Rope Piece (1983–1984), a collaboration with Linda Montano in which the artists spent a year tied together by an eight-foot rope. She reads his interviews and the philosophical texts that inspired him until the project becomes as much about her stepfather as it is about Hsieh. While switching between Alice’s stepfather’s decline in the late 2010s and Hsieh’s works in the 1980s, Chen develops an intelligent and deeply empathic portrayal of Alice witnessing her stepfather disappearing inside himself, and in doing so offers careful and illuminating observations on issues of cultural difference, productivity, family, and freedom. Chen’s own project is masterly and memorable. (Apr.)
Viet Thanh Nguyen
"From the making of art to the making of families, Lisa Hsiao Chen makes us realize the great beauty and courage found in everyday acts of care, work, endurance, and survival. Weaving between one daughter and her father, one artist and his work, Activities of Daily Living becomes a beguiling and brilliant meditation on what it means to live and die."
Millions - Kaulie Lewis
"Highly recommend for: fans of Chen’s poetry; fans of Olivia Laing and/or Ben Lerner; anyone who’s ever found themselves consumed by art; anyone who’s fighting the very nature of time (and, really, who isn’t?)."
The New Yorker - Hua Hsu
"Engrossing... [Chen] is an elegantly reserved writer. Her novel is digressive without feeling showy, sombre yet never maudlin."
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
"Activities of Daily Living is an exquisitely crafted archive that documents the living grief of witnessing a parent’s slow descent while summoning to life a radical genealogy of artists and writers. This novel is proof of the transformational power of art, a sublime performance that left me enchanted!"
Claire Messud
"Brilliant, fiercely honest, and exhilarating, Lisa Hsiao Chen’s Activities of Daily Living illuminates the symbiotic relationship of art and life—the art of life, indeed. This is a riveting and memorable novel."
San Francisco Chronicle - Kathryn Ma
"Like the work of writer Rachel Cusk, who brought new thinking to what constitutes a novel, Activities of Daily Living takes chances with the form to strong effect... In delivering a meditation on human frailty and endurance, Chen shows us how we cling to our chosen work and the hope buried within it."
Steph Cha
"Chen writes with cool, elegant precision... [Activities of Daily Living is] an utterly persuasive transmutation of the ordinary stuff of life."
author of So Many Olympic Exertions Anelise Chen
"The meditative quest that unfolds from this novel’s deceptively simple framework is as riveting as any page-turner. Filled with startling insight and moving detail, Activities of Daily Living will make you want to attend to life more fully—its joys as well as its griefs. What can literature do that other art forms can’t? This book is the answer."
Eugene Lim
"Activities of Daily Living is miraculously transformative of what it holds. Organized around the artworks of Tehching Hsieh and the act of witnessing a parent’s end of life, a circumscribed but questing narrator synthesizes the chaos and fragments of time, death, and illness into a moving and brilliant arcade—a project about exceptional and quotidian endurances weaved together via lifesaving and heartbreaking bricolage."
4Columns - Sukhdev Sandhu
"Activities of Daily Living is astringent, witty, attuned to the suddenly dimmed lighting and shrunken horizons experienced by city dwellers in early middle age... Insightful."
JUNE 2022 - AudioFile
The nature of time permeates Chen's audiobook, and Tina Huang's somber, thoughtful performance fits the narrative perfectly. Alice is a New York freelancer who is pursuing insights into an elusive performance artist whose work includes public displays of punching a time clock. Meanwhile, in California, Alice's father is progressing further into dementia, requiring increased assistance to manage his daily needs as he approaches death. As Alice explores her "projects," she creates a singular view of life: that all things require a beginning and an end. Huang’s narration evokes a cerebral audio environment that effectively conveys the novel's deep themes. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-02-09
Does time pass, or do we pass the time?
Alice, a 30-something Taiwanese woman raised on the West Coast and now living in New York, works as a video editor but devotes much of her time to her “project.” That endeavor is an inchoate attempt to chronicle the life and work (projects!) of performance artist Tehching Hsieh, a reclusive and enigmatic figure Alice refers to as the Artist. Another, parallel life-project occupies Alice’s time and preoccupies her attention: the slow deterioration of her hard-drinking stepfather—referred to as the Father—into a state of dementia and disability a continent away from her. Chen’s gracious examination of how a lifetime is spent follows Alice’s efforts to discover what happened to both men, who, it would seem, had little in common. In the case of the Artist, an early career of buzzed-about performance art pieces evolves into an attenuated disappearing act. The Father’s slow descent into unawareness portends a disappearance of another kind. Alice’s chronicle is laced through with references to artists and intellectuals and their pronouncements on the timeless issues faced by the men (and us all). Sartre and Sontag are among the thinkers with cameo roles, emphasizing the universality of life’s inevitable assaults on us and those we love. Alice’s relationships with others wax and wane over the course of the narrative—and her lifetime—in another illustration of the impermanence of the features of our lives. The human urge to fill time with projects of all sorts (movies, furniture building, writing, tying oneself to another person for a year!) is examined from all angles in Chen’s thoughtful and thought-filled meditation on time.
Elegiac and revealing, Chen’s debut illuminates the clock in our hearts.
