David Wong Louie (1954–2018)

This starts out as a lighter story of a young man whose life is pretty much aimless, but gets much heavier and more intense in the second half of the book. In the end, I think the point is that he never really takes control of his life. Instead, he looks to everyone else for direction and meaning.

This could've been a great book with the author's quick wit, good writing, and interesting story, but there are too many moments of self-loathing camouflaged as innocuous cultural assimilation for my liking. Sometimes authors need to just call stuff what it is instead of attempting to cloak it as something else. I could've tolerated the story more if Louie had just clarified some situations in the book as being self-loathing, period. For a book to be great, it has to be honest.