THE BETTER MOTHER by Jen Sookfong Lee (Knopf), 347 pages, $29.95 cloth. Rating: NNN
It’s always good news when a great first novel like The End Of East gets a strong follow-up. Obviously, Jen Sookfong Lee didn’t use up her talent the first time around.
In The Better Mother, gay photographer Danny begins a friendship with veteran stripper Val in the early 80s that helps him sort out his sexual identity – and his relationship with his straitlaced Chinese-Canadian parents – and leads her to resolve her resentments about a painful life decision she made many years before.
Lee has a gift for location. Val’s rundown childhood home on the Fraser River reeks of mould, Vancouver’s seedy burlesque quarter comes to life, and Stanley Park, where Danny used to cruise regularly, is a locus for dread and desperation as the AIDS virus takes hold.
Both main characters and their essential conflicts are expertly drawn, but we still have to fill in some blanks. Why does Danny’s boyhood encounter with Val have such an impact? Why does Val’s relationship with her sister Joan sour? And a strange sequence at the end of the book has Danny’s mother pay a visit to a strip club that’s supposed to tie something up but winds up doing the opposite and feels like a loose thread.
This was a problem in The End Of East as well. Lee has a habit of letting important details slide.
But the story rocks along, especially the segments leading up to Val’s decision to leave home, and the sequence in which Danny confronts AIDS is devastating.
Maybe not for this release, but one of these days Lee’s name will appear on all the big awards short lists. You heard it here first.
susanc@nowtoronto.com
