The Border of Paradise: A Novel

by Esmé Weijun Wang

Overview

A remarkable multigenerational novel, The Border of Paradise transports readers into the world of an iconoclastic midcentury family.


In booming postwar Brooklyn, the Nowak Piano Company is an American success story. There is just one problem: the Nowak’s only son, David. A handsome kid and shy like his mother, David struggles with neuroses. If not for his only friend, Marianne, David’s life would be intolerable. When David inherits the piano company at just 18 and Marianne breaks things off, David sells the company and travels around the world. In Taiwan, his life changes when he meets the daughter of a local madame — beautiful, sharp-tongued Daisy. Returning to the United States, the couple (and newborn son) buy an isolated country house in Northern California’s Polk Valley.

As David's mental health deteriorates, he has a brief affair with Marianne, producing a daughter. When Marianne appears at their doorstep, the couple's fateful decision to take the child as their own determines a tragic course of events for the entire family. Told from multiple perspectives, The Border of Paradise culminates in heartrending fashion, as the young heirs to the Nowak fortune must confront their past and the tragic reality of their future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939419699
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	04/12/2016
Pages:	292
Sales rank:	977,741
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Esmé Weijun Wang is an award-winning mental health advocate and speaker, as well as a journalist and essayist. The Border of Paradise is her first novel. She lives in San Francisco.

Editorial Reviews

"The Border of Paradise is shaped by darkness and the kind of delicious story that makes for missed train stops and bedtimes, keeping a reader up late for just one more page of dynamic character-bouncing perspective (an idea which came to Wang in dreams). It is the author’s stunning introduction to the literary world." —Alli Maloney, The New York Times

"Wang's prose is beautiful and restrained, and her generous, precise characterization makes every perspective feel organic and utterly real in the face of increasingly theatrical circumstances. The result — the story of an American family stretched and manipulated into impossible shapes — is an extraordinary literary and gothic novel of the highest order." —Carmen Maria Machado, NPR

"Gothic in tone, epic in ambition, and creepy in spades." —Kirkus Reviews

One of Library Journal's picks for Top Spring Indie Fiction:

"A well-wrought multigenerational novel that also appeals for its honest look at mental illness." —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

One of the Lit Hub's Books to Read in April:

"Wang takes Ahab’s rant of… 'madness maddened' and infuses it through all of the characters in this book, not just the ones who are identified as crazy. A terrifying look at dysfunction, manipulation, and psychological torture and love, yes love. A very deftly written first novel." —The Lit Hub

One of the Chicago Review of Books Best Books from Independent Presses in April

"Esmé Weijun Wang’s new novel focuses on the complex relationships among a family with a prosperous business in the post-war United States, and the conflicts and questions of family that occur over time." —Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"The Border of Paradise is a magnificent achievement – an exhortation for human tenderness and individual dignity in the most difficult of circumstances. Wang explores identity and family with a sense of drama that borders on gothic, without ever sacrificing the psychological texture that connects us to her characters." —Adrienne Celt, author of The Daughters

"Esme Weijun Wang's relentlessly moving debut The Border of Paradise is a profound epic of potent darkness with all sorts of unexpected light. The story of the Nowak family contains notes of Lidia Yuknavitch, Christine Schutt, and Kevin Wilson, and yet remains unlike anything I've ever read. Trauma is rendered gorgeously, from every angle, within every possibility. Whether tackling New York, California, or Taiwan, Wang performs this novel with glorious courage, ambition, passion, and style." —Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion

"A stunning meditation on the meaning of marriage, the limits of language, and the inescapable solitude of the mind. Esme Weijun Wang’s writing is spellbinding; her characters are hauntingly alive." —Jennifer DuBois, author of Cartwheel

From the Publisher

04/15/2016
Growing up in postwar Brooklyn, David wholeheartedly believes everything his immigrant Polish parents say about their Novak Piano Company: the pianos are important not just to the world of music but to America itself. He's also enchanted by beautiful Marianne Pawlowski when she sings at their house, but their engagement is broken off; David's incipient mental illness emerges after he sells the company he inherits as an adolescent, and his life flounders over decades. Though readers know from the beginning that David will commit suicide, his decline is heartbreaking. VERDICT A well-wrought multigenerational novel that also appeals for its honest look at mental illness.

Library Journal

2016-01-21
A grievous unhappiness rakes across this novel about the slow self-destruction of the isolated Nowak family. Wang's debut begins with a suicidal David Nowak's reminiscences of his mid-20th-century childhood, which raises ghosts of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, both in style and in the self-flagellating obsessions of a neurotic boy. He spends his Brooklyn youth deep in a self-hatred from which he is occasionally rescued by his fixation on a neighbor girl, the lovely and innocent Marianne. When his father's sudden death leads to the hapless David's decision to sell the piano company he has inherited, Marianne abandons him under the pressure of her family's disdain, and so begins the series of events that becomes the death-seeking spiral that forms this novel. Not yet 20, David aimlessly lets his wealth take him to Taiwan, where he meets a bold bar girl named Jia-Hui Chen, whose "sappy, sloppy girlishness" makes his "nerves squirm with delight." David and the girl he renames Daisy alternate telling the story of the early years of their marriage, "hemorrhaging money" in California. Daisy's voice is brash and matter-of-fact, a welcome relief from David's morose, confessional detailing of his progressive madness. Eventually they hole up in a valley in the Sierras, "a place of brambling woods and mining shafts." Penned in first by David's aloofness and then by Daisy's growing paranoia, the Nowaks' world shrinks and becomes increasingly eccentric. When their overly obedient teenage son William picks up the narrative, his voice is an exact echo of his father's. So is his obsessive love for pubescent girls. Wang's deeply uncomfortable and somber novel is soaked with bizarre details, yet only in its final movements does the pace shift from static and entrapping to horrifically propulsive as the distant hope of escape glimmers. More focused on psychology than plot, Wang's novel remains extraordinarily unresolved, with sudden brutalities that send the story haring toward an unexpected, abrupt ending.Gothic in tone, epic in ambition, and creepy in spades.

Kirkus Reviews