Lurkers by Sandi Tan

Published by Soho Press on March 30, 2021

The characters in Lurkers are connected by their mutual residence on Santa Claus Lane in Alta Vista. A blue couch travels from one neighborhood home to another, while the owner of a third home wonders about its incongruence. A man writes bad fiction that his wife shares with a neighbor who is a published writer. Characters who occupied one home end up living in another. Characters’ lives are affected by neighbors they barely recognize.

Beverly Joon Park is a widow with two daughters. Her father was the pastor of a Korean evangelical church. Her husband converted to Christianity to marry her. When Beverly’s father died, her husband felt an obligation to take over as the church’s pastor. After her husband’s suicide, Beverly’s only desire is to sell her house (after she rids it of termites) so she can return with her daughters to Korea, a place she claimed to despise in the past. Now she just wants to live in a place that will not make her feel like a second-class citizen.

Beverly’s older daughter, Rosemary, is “a mysterious black box of womanly secrets.” She loses her virginity to a 16-year-old loser who turns out to be a bad choice for sexual partnership. Her obsession with a married drama teacher who might be a sexual predator is probably even worse. Yet Rosemary feels caged; only vigorous and frequent sex allows her to taste the freedom she craves. Beverly’s younger daughter, Mira, works to sabotage the move to Korea, a place where she imagines “all the men wore fake Air Jordans, burped kimchi and spent their spare time beating up their wives.”

Another neighborhood homeowner, Raymond van der Holt, is an aging gay man who made some money writing zombie novels and now spends his days brooding about his “casual brushes with the supernatural.” His muse has deserted him but he doesn’t want to write nonfiction, “a genre cherished beyond what it deserved by NPR-addled Americans.” His belief that Mira has been stalking him, masquerading as a demon, might be the product of a failing mind, as might certain other incidents that only Raymond perceives.

The other key neighbor is Kate Ireland, who occupies a house owned by her mother, Mary-Sue. Kate’s high school friend Bluto breezes into town and looks her up, bringing an underage girlfriend along for the ride. Against her better judgment, Kate ends up pregnant and stalked.

An ominous atmosphere pervades this darkly amusing novel. A police helicopter regularly circles the characters’ homes, perhaps looking for burglars who are plaguing the neighborhood. Men wearing hoods make threats and commit arson. A naked girl repeatedly slams her body against Raymond’s window, leaving smudged breast prints on the glass. At least two male characters are taking advantage of teenage girls. Sandi Tan leaves the impression that most men would do the same if they could get away with it.

While this is a novel of connections, few of the connections reach beyond the superficial, which I assume to be the point Tan is making about LA suburban life. Raymond is lonely, with only spirits to keep him company, in part because the people he encounters do not live up to his standards. Rosemary uses sex as a substitute for intimacy and sees nonphysical relationships as something to be endured. Kate has only her mother and the baby she created with Bluto, but it isn’t clear that she wants either of them in her life. There is little balance in this novel, little joy as a counterweight against gloom, but Tan peppers the story with enough moments of humor to keep the reader from joining Mr. Park in suicide. And despite the superficiality of their lives, the characters are developed in a satisfying degree of depth.

A letter from Beverly at the novel’s end might best sum up the novel’s philosophy. While she talks about Korea’s “culture of sadism, paranoia, and pointless rivalries” that, along with consumerism, keep people subservient, Beverly could just as easily be talking about her suburban life. The glimmers of hope we see in that old letter will, we know, eventually be lost.

An act of malice ends the novel on a surprising note, although the story’s absence of direction makes it surprising only in Tan’s refusal to compromise by delivering a happy ending. This isn’t a feel-good story. Life doesn’t always deliver the pleasure we desire. For some, pleasure is rare. Lurkers reflects that reality but does so in a nuanced way that never becomes overbearing or oppressive.

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