The Majesties by Tiffany Tsao

First published in Australia in 2018; published by Atria Books on January 21, 2020

The Majesties is Crazy Rich Asians without the crazy. Or, at least, with a different kind of crazy. The Majesties lacks the humor of Kevin Kwan’s novel (and avoids the romantic cheese of the movie version). Instead, Tiffany Tsao purports to explore the impact of wealth on an extended Indonesian family. The Majesties is a family drama that descends into a very strange melodrama, but it takes an honest look at divisions caused by race and class in both Indonesia and America.

The story is told in the first person by Gwendolyn, who opens the novel with the revelation that her sister Estella murdered three hundred people, including herself, by poisoning their shark fin soup. Gwendolyn is the sole survivor. We later learn that this was not the first occasion on which Estella used poison to solve a problem, but Gwendolyn does not understand why her sister was motivated to wipe out so many people. The forced explanation that emerges at the end of the novel is far from convincing.

After the introductory mass murder, the novel backtracks to fill in the details of the narrator’s dysfunctional family. Estella and Gwendolyn are the granddaughters of Chinese tycoon Irwan Sulinado. The family conglomerate is based in Indonesia. Their business holdings involve textiles, agriculture, and mining, although various family members have branched out according to their interests and talents. Estella was put in charge of a profitable business that manufactures silk, although the business pretty much runs itself, leaving Estella free to live a life of fashionable frivolity. Gwendolyn founded a company called Bagatelle that makes jewelry from live insects, an idea that is sufficiently revolting to assure its success. The rest of the family is peeved that independent Gwendolyn refused to link her business to the family conglomerate.

Estella married Leonard, merging two prestigious families despite Leonard’s inability to meet the Sulinado standard of business management. His failure to turn a profit contributes to family conflict, as does his eventual decision to embrace Jesus and reject corruption (a decision that imperils family businesses that depend on corruption for their survival).

Additional family drama comes from Irwan’s remarriage to a younger woman “of humble stock” before his dead wife’s body was cold. The rest of the family treats the new grandmother as inconsequential, although she has the saving grace of being Chinese. The family insists on maintaining racial purity, despite the intermingling of a Javanese ancestor and a more recent half-Caucasian bride.

The plot moves to California when Estella and Gwendolyn discover a picture of a deceased aunt named Sandra. The picture was taken some years after the aunt’s supposed death. They decide to get to the bottom of the mystery by tracking her down.

The Majesties is refreshing in that it is not a “love conquers all” story. Sandra once studied in Australia, where she met a student from Jakarta. They began a friendship and potential romance until she discovered that, despite his physical appearance, the student was Javanese, not Chinese, and a Muslim to boot. The student resented the Chinese for their refusal to employ non-Chinese and resented his Chinese features because they impeded his hiring by Muslim employers. Still hoped to pursue the spark she felt, Sandra tries to stay in touch, but their subsequent encounters in Jakarta only gave her an opportunity to glimpse the lives lived by the city’s less fortunate residents. Thanks to Sandra’s father, friendship is difficult and romance is impossible. Sandra’s story approaches melodrama, but not nearly to the degree of Estella’s, who after all turns out to be a mass murderer.

The Majesties works best when it illuminates prejudice in circumstances that open the eyes of the privileged to the realities faced by the unfortunate. It is less successful when it chronicles the cruel dysfunctions of the Sulinado family. Gwenolyn learns that the family icons she has idolized are imperfect, but those lessons should have been apparent to her much earlier. Gwendolyn’s resolute independence is hard to square with her decision to maintain any relationship with her family at all. In any event, by the novel’s end, Gwendolyn cannot lay claim to a moral standard, making it difficult to care about her fate.

The novel’s themes will be familiar to fans of Dynasty and Dallas (Sandra’s disappearance being the dramatic equivalent of “Who shot J.R.?”). I watched Dallas as a guilty pleasure; The Majesties has a similar appeal. But just as Dallas eventually lost its way, so too the plot of The Majesties eventually derails. The climax requires the reader to rethink the story, but the sudden change of perspective is just too far over-the-top to be believable. The story steadily loses credibility, substantially offsetting its entertainment value, until it reaches a resolution that just doesn’t work. Dallas was at least meant to be cheesy; The Majesties has loftier aspirations that it never quite achieves.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS