Booklist Review

The unnamed narrator of Lin's brilliant debut is the 12-year-old son of Taiwanese immigrant parents who own a rundown motel on the New Jersey coast. Catering to impecunious old men in the winter, to higher-paying "Bennys" (stands for Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark, and New York--these customers' hometowns) in the summer, and to hookers' johns year-round, it is no place to grow up in, but it is what his parents have chosen to succeed in, in America. The boy works the front desk and does chores whenever he isn't in school or asleep. Newly postpubescent, big for his age, and egged on by a friendly Benny ("Girls were all over me when I was like eight," he boasts), the boy makes getting laid his prime objective between Benny seasons. As he progresses toward his goal, Lin carefully reveals, through him, what making it in America can entail for even bright, ambitious newcomers. Awash in a sea of stupidity and venality, the boy, neither stupid nor venal, seems bent on more than hauling his ashes, and after his father suffers a stroke, and relatives come from Taiwan to keep the motel afloat, he looks like a prevailer, not just a survivor. Lin's unsentimental, purely realist--not naturalist, not socialist, not postmodernist--novel raises hopes that American fiction may yet grow up. --Ray Olson