Pamela: A Novel (Atelos (Series), 4.)

Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel rocks. Lu manages to explore, critique, and worry about identity, location, self-expression, communication, shopping malls, orange dresses, and the future with glorious intelligence and laugh-out-loud humor, in the context of exquisitely wrought and very long sentences. One suspects that, like the character YJ, Lu "was always living and writing against a blind wall of cacophony that existed somewhere between plain sense and the din of cultural expectation and popular music." The narrator P (as well as her twenty-something friends L, R, YJ, C, A, and so on) thus occupies "the contemporary position of always being foreign to herself, a private predicament which necessarily played itself out on the public level, in the politics of making a literature that struggled to catch sight of itself, as if that could provide some assurance of its existence. We were using a borrowed language to add more words to our names ..." Where do we draw the line between fiction and autobiography? Frankly, when reading Pamela, we could care less. The truth of this writing is in its extreme excellence: we need no more.