Publishers Weekly
10/03/2022
In Australian writer Lau’s imaginative if underpowered sophomore effort (after Pink Mountain on Locust Island), a young woman opens a business in a sinister shopping mall. New business owner Leen, 24, originally from Hong Kong, attempts to attract Westerners to the traditional Chinese art of ear cleaning with Lotus Fusion Studio, which she operates out of a shopping complex called Topic Heights. As Leen struggles to attract customers, she meets Jean Paul, a smarmy pharmacist who invites her to a community group advocating for better treatment of retail employees, and becomes the reluctant getaway driver (Jean Paul doesn’t have a car) for the group’s “Resisting Acts,” a series of increasingly malevolent pranks on stores in Topic Heights. Then, Leen’s roommates ask her to move out so that they can focus on their new business manufacturing synthetic human urine to help people beat drug tests, and she becomes romantically involved with Luis, the manager of a successful franchise of a large Chinese lifestyle brand. Lau makes some good points about consumerism and ably captures the mood of disenchanted youth, but the slow pacing and underdeveloped supporting characters make this feel aimless. Lau has plenty of talent, but while this starts strong, it falls apart at the end. (Dec.)
From the Publisher
"A sardonic, Klieg-lit tale of consumerism and capitalism gone awry."
—Gregory Cowles, A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
"[Lau's] gift for writing accumulative insanities creates the same dizzying effect as a good cleaning." —Alexandra Tanner, The New York Times Book Review
"Lau delivers an astute narrative . . . an exposé of and warning to a society on the verge of failing its young adults. Lau herself is of that very generation, making her sharp, shrewd observations about discontent and disconnect more immediately caustic, as well as—ironically—more reliably empathetic."
—Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness
"Funny, bold, capacious . . . this book mirrors modern life."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Lau makes . . . good points about consumerism and ably captures the mood of disenchanted youth . . . [She] has plenty of talent."
—Publishers Weekly
“A dissociative meditation on a world that has come to feel increasingly meaningless, Lau's second novel harks back to an older era of Australian fiction . . . her prose combines the languid torpor of Michael Bible with the unease of Yoko Ogawa's more macabre work . . . She reminds us of the adventurousness that once saw local writers and directors win both sales and critical acclaim . . . Their spirits are sorely missing from the landscape today. Lau is to be commended for keeping them alive.”
―Declan Fry, The Guardian
“Taking aim at consumerism, class and orientalism, Gunk Baby is an original and unforgettable read.”
―Cosmopolitan
“The viscerality of violence in Lau’s world expands and contracts between banal and horrific; oppression and resistance while denying us the purgative resolution we are so attached to . . . Gunk Baby explores the cruel optimism of enacting personal revenge for a structural issue.”
—Taylor Mitchell, Kill Your Darlings
“Jamie Marina Lau's style is captivating—you're drawn into the stagnant world of this Australian suburbia, and everything seems bizarre and off in a way that makes you feel constantly uncomfortable.”
―Prudence Wade, The Independent
“A book like this—that doesn't take the expected route, that gambles on a quiet and potentially difficult-to-access protagonist—is a gift . . . Lau's strength as an author shines in this space she has carved out for herself . . . Gunk Baby, despite its surreal aura, exposes power structures and daily violence in a way that will make you think about the real world a little deeper.”
―Elizabeth Flux, The Monthly Magazine
“What a novel—as it is formally defined—should be: novel. Lau's talent is in excavating the psyche of her characters and their environments . . . Gunk Baby is the artistic equivalent of an ongoing disintegration, an experimental critique of the absurdities of consumer culture.”
―Cher Tan, The Saturday Paper
“A disorienting and sinister consumerist dystopia. Gunk Baby is the blackest sort of satire on post-industrial anomie, though it has a sharp sense of intellectual playfulness too . . . Fans of Bret Easton Ellis, J.G. Ballard or Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club will lap up the affectless nihilism of Lau's vision: it reopens a peculiar vein of postmodern darkness that seemed to have all but collapsed in Australian fiction.”
―Cameron Woodhead, Sydney Morning Herald
“The poison of capitalism and consumerism seeps through the pages of Gunk Baby so subtly that the reader barely notices until they are drowning in it . . . A writer of the zeitgeist, Lau uses a distinctly ‘online’ voice that speaks to the disconnect of the present generation and to the bleak, capital-driven path humanity took to get there. An audacious, nihilistic novel.”
―Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, Australia Book Review
“A tender horror story, all the more haunting for being so familiar, Gunk Baby captures the plight of the body—its fragility, its need for connection—in a world of surveillance and synthetic calm. Lau's voice is cool, precise yet unfailingly human, taking aim at mall culture, work culture and consumer culture, and revealing them as excuses we whisper to ourselves as we lurch slowly towards a luxurious void.”
—Roisin Kiberd, author of The Disconnect
“A new, detuned world, globalized but specific, casually weird, Jamie Marina Lau's sensibility is elliptical and it is unique; here is a new existence among the malls of instant consumerism.”
—Alan Warner, author of Their Lips Talk of Mischief
Kirkus Reviews
2022-10-12
The second novel by young Australian writer Lau is a maximalist caper set in the most achingly existential of modern locales: a suburban shopping mall.
Twenty-four-year-old Leen is adrift in her life. She and her mother settled in Par Mars, a suburb of carefully anonymizing subdivisions, when Leen was a child because they were attracted to “the tiredness of it, the bored unattractiveness of it, the lonely, antisocial nature of it, that made [them] both look inward.” Both her parents have since moved on, and Leen is left crashing somewhat indefinitely in her friend Doms’ living room, taking courses in massage therapy, and watching analysis videos of movies on her phone. With seed money from her peripatetic father and instruction from her mother—who has recently started a “healing business” in Hong Kong—Leen opens an ear-cleaning and massage studio in the Topic Heights shopping center, which sits in the center of the Par Mars suburb and represents “the exact summation of every need and personality of the people residing in its hem.” Though both Par Mars and Topic Heights strive to create the impression of regulation, order, and predictably scaled progress, there are signs that things are starting to come loose at the seams. Vic, Doms’ Nigerian boyfriend, is beaten in the street in a possibly racially motivated attack, and the rising unrest among the low-wage workers in Topic Heights is an expression of the growing social divide between people like Peggy—the CEO of the shopping complex, who facilitates drug-fueled swinger parties at her hilltop house on the coastal side of the estates—and people like Jean Paul, a nihilist pharmacy assistant who hosts social resistance meetings at the East Par Mars Community Center. As her business founders, Leen becomes increasingly involved with Jean Paul’s Resistance Acts—which begin as essentially harmless pranks against Topic Heights management but quickly escalate into psychological torment and then real bodily harm—even as she starts to doubt the purity of his proletariat motives. Lau’s second novel treads similar ground as Pink Mountain on Locust Island (2020), her debut take on Gen Z alienation, but with a hyperconscious maximalism that occasionally overwhelms the reader with the equity of its attention. There is so much to see in this novel that the reader is sometimes at a loss for where to look.
Funny, bold, capacious, and more than a little exhausting—this book mirrors modern life.
