MEMORY PIECE, by Lisa Ko
Before doomscrolling, what did we do with all that spare time? Sometimes it’s difficult to recall. And some people will never know.
Lisa Ko’s socially astute and formally innovative second novel, “Memory Piece,” takes readers back to the dawn of the internet: when its hot glow was lurking just below the horizon and we thought we had the measure of its power, before it became the very light by which we see.
Her first novel, “The Leavers,” a finalist for the National Book Award, was about a Chinese American boy seemingly abandoned by his mother; his drift after being adopted by an overbearing white couple; and her thwarted bid for freedom. “Memory Piece,” by contrast, is giddy with women’s liberation, closely following three Asian American friends who meet as girls at a Fourth of July barbecue, come of age when the country was still meting out history in neat decade-long chunks — “even the nine in 1990s felt cold and steely,” a character correctly notes — and all make unconventional life choices. A marriage plot this is not.
The book is framed by Giselle Chin, an artist of the Marina Abramovic school who herself resists any framing. Giselle’s notable works include living secretly in a room at the Paramus Park shopping center in New Jersey for a year (“Mall Piece”) wandering around Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery in white clothing for half a dozen menstrual cycles (“Blood Piece”); and, for the project that gives the book its title, handwriting memories for days and then burning the pages in public. She is devoted to her calling and pragmatic in her relationships, dating a past-his-prime artist from a rich family.
The second main character is Jackie Ong, who sneaks food, clothes and toiletries into the hiding place at the mall; regularly photographs its temporary inhabitant; and — testing the outer limits of bestie — carries away buckets of her excrement. (“Memory Piece” is notably frank about human waste, its quantity, quality and disposal, and matter-of-fact about sex.) Gay and cool, Jackie becomes the director of web technology at a company called Wonder, an early delivery service that resembles Kozmo.com, and then a whistle-blower revealing its shady business practices.
For a hobby, she has been quietly building a proto-social network composed of online diaries called Lene, after a favorite third-grade teacher named Arlene. (I flashed fondly on Echo, not the frighteningly surveilling Amazon device but the warm and janky bulletin board founded in 1990 by Stacy Horn, author of the trenchant memoirs “Cyberville” and “Waiting for My Cats to Die.”)
The third and least scrutable friend is Ellen Ng, who becomes Jackie’s sometime lover: a social activist who creates a commune, Sola Squat, in New York’s rapidly gentrifying East Village neighborhood. Foraging from dumpsters, attending demonstrations and using the Xerox machine at her office job to make zines, she’s idealistic and a little tedious.
Novelists of recent New York history have no obligation to cover 9/11 or the pandemic, of course, but that “Memory Piece” skips over both is, as the kids say, a choice.
After taking the trio through the dot-com bust, the novel drops them in a mysterious but wholly imaginable dystopian future, with facial-recognition checkpoints, fiery encampments, people holding guns along with their devices and an increasingly dominant corporate-technological entity called, of all things, Lacuna. (Its villainous millionaire founder also naturally wants to acquire Lene.)
Feature journalism, at least, has somehow endured, and though Giselle craves recognition, she also mocks the sycophantic white interviewer who comes to see her, and the very point of a profile article, thinking Jenny Holzer-like:
HOW DO YOU LIVE (HOW DARE YOU LIVE)
WHAT DO YOU DO (WHAT SHOULD WE DO)
HOW DO WE LIVE HOW DO WE DIE WHAT DO WE NEED TO HEAR
Some of Ko’s experiments, such as the insertion of “archival” photos from the 2030s — shades of last year’s “Biography of X” — puzzle more than illuminate. (Like, what’s up with the water towers?) A terrible, semi-apocalyptic event has certainly occurred, and there are military bases everywhere, but the details are hazy. We do know that an aged Ellen is now a delivery driver herself, wearing a diaper for efficiency and mainlining weed tincture for pain.
Gritty and refreshingly girl-centric, “Memory Piece” is finest as a novel of the analog, reminding, for example, how we once peered at “scrambled cable channels, the premium ones their parents used to subscribe to, and tried to decode body parts” — a time capsule of mixtapes, newspaper collages and Crystal Light.
It documents the last days of people being untrackable, able to disappear, and for this alone lingers in the imagination.
MEMORY PIECE | By Lisa Ko | Riverhead | 304 pp. | $28
