Keep Your Enemies Close

A Taiwanese American grad student reckons with the academy, her overbearing mother, and her white boyfriend in this biting and laugh-out-loud-funny indictment of self-assimilation.

Connie Wang is struggling. Stalled out in the middle of her dissertation on social camouflage in Catcher in the Rye, resentful of her filial obligations, and inundated with the boxes of Costco goods her mother obsessively buys her, she finds herself paralyzed and on the verge of getting kicked out of school. She blames it all on her manipulative, narcissistic mother, and dreams of escaping her immigrant past. But when her therapist-in-training boyfriend urges her to go “no contact,” she begins to wonder if assimilation is attainable, if an immigrant daughter can ever truly ditch her family, and whether Holden Caulfield is a truthteller or simply a spoiled brat.

For fans of Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Doris W. Cheng’s debut novel turns a penetrating eye to race and culture, challenging conventional notions about the immigrant story. Following a protagonist as flawed as she is funny, Keep Your Enemies Close is a hilarious—and moving—paean to female rage.