by Devyn Andrews
October 15, 2024
Masquerade by Mike Fu; Tinhouse; 352 pages; $17.95.
It’s impossible to say whether the title of Mike Fu’s debut novel Masquerade should be read as a noun or a verb. Its syntactic ambiguity captures both the mask and the masking, pretense and the act of pretending. Even more, the book announces its interest in illusions before the story has even begun. In this sense, the title perfectly reflects some of the central concerns of Fu’s dynamic and enigmatic metafiction about what it means to write, or to tell a story, or to live one. Equally interested in the ordinary and extraordinary encounters, Masquerade ultimately finds its niche in the everyday clash of the surreal and the mundane, or the bizarre and banal business of being alive.
A vibrant narrative collaged out of memory, hallucination, and stories-within-stories, Masquerade is bildungsroman that explores queerness, cultural identity, agency, and individuality. The story follows 31-year old former Comparative Literature student Meadow Liu as he spends a restless summer between apartments , navigating a break up, bartending, and contemplating what he should do with his life next. Fu’s prose is fluid and well-paced throughout the novel, and his third-person narration consistently renders singular moments as well as periods of habitual action in Meadow’s life in vivid, engaging, and well-observed detail.
At the beginning of the story, Meadow finds himself at crossroads, constantly pulled between the Eastern and Western hemispheres , his own past and tenuous present, and bouts of inebriated consciousness and hyper-realistic dreaming. He spends most of the summer jet lagged, visiting his parents in Shanghai before returning to Brooklyn, where he has an (envy-inspiring) setup house sitting for his elusive artist friend Selma Shimizu. As the summer continues, Meadow finds himself at the center of many strange occurrences: an odd patron at the bar offers him symbolic advice, time seems to be passing inconsistently, doppelgangers appear in the streets of New York, and Selma silently goes missing.
Throughout the summer, Meadow has also been reading a cryptic novel set at a masquerade ball in 1930s Shanghai called “The Masquerade.” Initially discovering the book on Selma’s bookshelf, he is drawn to “The Masquerade” because its author (one Liu Tian), shares Meadow’s name in Chinese. Despite its publication date in the 1940s, Meadow quickly notices eerie parallels between the book he is reading and the events occurring in his own life, almost as if everything he knows to be true is, in fact, an illusion.
Though Masquerade differs from many conventional mysteries– it is decidedly not a plot-driven whodunnit– the narratives Fu sows early in the novel come back beautifully full-circle. Like any good mystery novel, Masquerade relishes in detail, particularly those which at first seem insignificant but gain importance with hindsight. Fittingly for a story about stories, we begin, in the first sentence of the novel, with a book:
“He discovers the book on a pale June morning while scrabbling around Selma’s apartment in a hungover
haze.”
Masquerade’s metafictional awareness—the sense that it knows on some level that it is a book—plays to its strengths. In Fu’s fictive world, Meadow often becomes disoriented while reading; we learn that Meadow often picks up “The Masquerade” during “liminal hours, as night transitions into day, [when] Meadow is … so stoned that the border between his life and that of the book seems to start to dissolve, or become permeable. He scours the text for a hint or clue, but remains empty-handed.” The self-referential qualities of Fu’s work are simultaneously loud on the page and are endowed with a certain subtlety; as he does with the novel’s title, Fu demonstrates a daring yet controlled command of language and story. In these metafictional moments, Fu seems to highlight the importance of storytelling in questions of agency and making sense of the world. Blurring the lines between reality and fiction, he draws a parallel between the position of his protagonist and the position of his reader in a way that feels life-like. After all, Meadow’s is a fundamentally human problem—as many of us do, he seeks truth in language, looking for clues about his own life within stories about others.
Fu's commitment to psychological realism in Masquerade nicely compliments the novel’s surrealist moments, and as the work ventures into dreamlike spacesFormally, Masquerade is impressively agile, shifting between past and present tenses and weaving threads from the discovered novel “The Masquerade” throughout its complex tapestry. Reality seems fluid in the world of Masquerade—when Meadow serves a strange patron a glass of wine at the bar, a mysterious stranger speaks in a voice remarkably similar to the narrative voice of “The Masquerade.” “‘We live in a forest of symbols, in the modern world,’” the stranger says to Meadow. “‘A name, a number, a note of music, they all have their own solitary power detached from the things they represent. They exist as shapes and sounds in primal, elemental form… Pay attention to symbols.’”
In less capable hands, this kind of narrative entanglement might lead to diminishing returns, though Fu’s attention to detail and high tolerance for ambiguity make for a striking accomplishment. Meadow wrestles with the meaning of these words just as much as a reader might (a well-calibrated choice by Fu) in a way that ultimately draws readers into the mystery and the task of meaning-making rather than excluding them.
Fu's commitment to psychological realism in Masquerade nicely compliments the novel's surrealist moments, an as far as the work ventures into dreamlike spaces, it reaches equally as deep into the heart of human experience. Particularly grounding for the story are the moments that Fu focuses on the sensory: food, sex, and sights and smells of the urban landscape. “Diego’s hair still wet with rain,” Fu writes in a particularly notable scene depicting the memory of an encounter between Meadow and his former boyfriend. “This was the sensory snapshot that Meadow would carry with him long past this night. Cold rain and hot sweat, a blur of bodies in which Meadow nearly forgot who and where he was until a vision of Diego appeared prostrate before him, face against the pillow.”
There is also strong attention given to those altered states of consciousness that occur in everyday life— the liminal, half-conscious experience of walking home in a quiet city when late night becomes early morning, or the state of jetlagged and semi-hallucinatory exhaustion that follows international flights, or the anxious and giggly come-up of an afternoon spent on magic mushrooms, or the nauseating experience of finishing half a bottle of bourbon by oneself. To his credit, Fu doesn't glamorize or moralize these states within the work; these movements serve a purpose compositionally, capturing the familiar strangeness of simply existing in a body, experiencing the passage of time.
Fu’s aims high in his debut, and earns his readers trust, and though it has an unconventional relationship to plot, Masquerade is ultimately an expansive and intricately-layered novel that explores the feeling of not being in control of one’s own story and how one can reclaim agency each and every day.
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Everyday Surrealism: Masquerade by Mike Fu
FICTION
Image by Preslava Glushkova from Unsplash
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Devyn Andrews is a graduate of the University of Illinois Chicago Program for Writers. Her work has been published in Cutthroat, Memezine, and elsewhere. Previously, she lived in Boston and Sacramento.
