The book orbits Keru and Nate, a "DINK" (double income, no kids) couple: She is a business consultant while he is an assistant professor who studies fruit flies. One year after the COVID pandemic, they decide to invite, in turn, her parents, then his parents to spend time with them in two rental houses; not-so-deeply buried grievances are disinterred, racial prejudices are ventilated, a marriage may be on the point of imploding.
Data points about Keru and Nate's personal lives are meted out by an omniscient narrator by the truckload. The couple's meet-cute at an undergraduate Halloween party is more memorable for what they wore (she was dressed in "leopard-print turtleneck, a plaid jacket, and shiny gold pants"; he sported a "silly foam fin") than what they said to each other. After they wed and move in together, the narration takes on even more of a rote quality. "There was a sequence of topics her parents preferred. First, careers, at what point in the near future would Nate get tenure and Keru make partner. [...] Second, finances and her father's position on how best to save money. [...] Then, kids?" With clocklike regularity, the book flashes back to events from Nate's and Keru's lives: their college graduation ceremony, their courtship, their paying off of student loans, their search for stable employment.
If the list seems rather, well, listless: Consider yourself warned. The narrative is rarely enlivened with humor or wit and often more resembles a dossier than a novel. This lack of narrative intrigue comes as a surprise from a writer whose first book brimmed with winsome, unforgettable detail. The quotient of jokes was also higher and the quality better in that earlier work. "The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The chemist sees the glass completely full, half in liquid state and half in gaseous, both of which are probably poisonous," went a typical observation. In "Rental House," we have this cruder and offensively obvious formulation: "Is the vase empty or full? Say the individuals are a couple. If they're silent, they're bored. But when they converse, they disagree. Full, one person says about the vase (the optimist). Empty, says the other (the pessimist)."
When not dealing in abstractions or cliches, the information offered up in "Rental House" frequently reinforce rebarbative stereotypes: Keru's Chinese father, for instance, has a hobby of mentally calculating a property's "price per square feet" and is obsessed with money. Wang is at her most platitudinous on the theme of immigration: "Immigration was a zero-sum game in which the alternative could never be known." "To immigrate was to drink the Kool-Aid." "To suffer is to strive and to set a bar so high that one never becomes complacent." "To suffer is to live."
The book exhibits diminishing returns with such formulaic "To do X is to do Y" parallelisms; in any case, the last statement is patently false: One may suffer through all manner of things, including a novel, without in any meaningful sense having "lived." Moreover, because the book is told in the third person, large chunks are subordinated to the narrator's toneless description and steamrolls through the force of the passive voice. Whereas in her first two novels, Wang demonstrated a virtuosic ability at channeling her protagonists' winningly indecisive ("Chemistry") or genially anhedonic ("Joan is Okay") voices, the voice of "Rental House" is terminally devoid of affect. Watching a real estate show featuring an "expat couple," we read that "these numbers were flashed across the screen but not dwelled upon." What's also not dwelled upon are the characters' interior states.
It's also a curiosity that Keru's and Nate's parents are never given proper names, though more objectively minor characters are, including Nate's aunt, his older brother, and the brother's girlfriend. Even the couple's 4-year-old sheepdog is given a name: Mantou, which, as Keru explains, means "steamed bun" in Chinese. This selective onomastic opacity often results in awkward constructions with misplaced modifiers like the following: "Keru asked why the dress had to be Lilly Pulitzer, and his mother seemed hurt that she didn't know who this exciting person was." More damagingly, it renders the parents as ciphers and encourages us to think of them as in some way interchangeable.
Ultimately, whether they are named or unnamed, the characters inhabiting "Rental House" are no more than floating signifiers for garden variety problems, whether of the yuppie (Nate and Keru), lower class or "white trash" (Nate's parents), or assimilationist strains (Keru's parents). Even an incident that should set readers back on their heels, such as a character tossing an enflamed piece of wood into a house, seems less like a logical extension of any previous event than an observance of Chekhov's less famous law: If a character naively wonders aloud "Why would the house catch on fire?" on page 9, said house must catch on fire before long.
Far from living rent-free in one's mind, the characters of "Rental House" are ghostly vacationers who show themselves quickly out the door.