Edge Case

this book makes me feel so seen. as a foreigner (indonesian, very close to malaysai!) currently in the US, Chin highlights many of the same issues and anxieties that i’ve felt in my time here. the question of belonging, both here and back home, is one that i think about everyday. it was both so pleasant but also kind of mortifying to read. honestly, this might be my new favorite book.

I was provided an ARC by Ecco in exchange for an honest review, which can be found below.

There's really a lot to admire about this novel, but on the whole it failed to amount to much. The writing is consistently good and it's packed with lots of unique details and insights. However, it felt cluttered, as a lot of those details distract from what should be the crux of the story: the relationship between Edwina and Marlin.

The backdrop to the book and the source of many of Edwina's anxieties is the looming prospect of her visa expiring and her ambition to secure a green card. Chin does an excellent job of dealing with this particular aspect of the story, but at its heart this is a procedural problem, full of forms and qualifications and checkboxes. And yet it seems to bleed over into the relationship aspect, too, which becomes a binary: he wants x and she wants y. Some of this is understandable, like Edwina's need for a spousal endorsement for her green card application compounding her worries about finding Marlin. But ultimately, it leads to a deeply unsatisfying conclusion to the book. Chin demonstrated throughout the ways in which Marlin and Edwina differ: the fact-oriented engineer vs. the imaginative literature major, sudoku vs. crosswords, etc. Interestingly, the conflict ends up being a reversal of their personalities, it seems. Marlin becomes the irrational one, desperately searching for meaning in the occult following the loss of his father, while Edwina is paralyzed by her fixation on her immigration status. Chin addresses this explicitly towards the climax of the novel:

Was I now taking cues from a government form in the same way? Learning how to be a person, a wife, a daughter, from numbered questions? Maybe that was precisely what Marlin was resisting.

I thought this was the setup to reconciliation and compromise, with each party recognizing the other's needs and feelings and the couple ultimately drawn back together by their shared experiences — chronicled so lovingly in the “Before” chapters. Alas, no. In one of the final paragraphs Edwina states:

But it was impossible. I might manage to go along with his vision for a moment—this moment—or maybe even an hour, a day, a week. Yet even if I didn't know myself very well anymore, I was certain I would forever regret not finding out whether that green card would materialize.

And so it turns out that the problem at the beginning of the novel, “my grief-stricken husband spiraled out of control and left me,” is the same problem at the end of the novel. There is a lot that goes on in between, almost all of which felt fresh and novel, detailing their upbringings in Malaysia, their experience as immigrants in the Trump era, and Edwina's ordeals as the only woman in a toxic tech startup. But given the conclusion to the main storyline, all of this felt inconsequential, like it was just inserted to pad the middle of the book.

I can't say that I'd recommend Edge Case to a friend, but Chin is clearly a very talented writer and I look forward to reading her future works.