Book Review: Chinese New Year

I’ve just finished C.E. O’Banion’s first novel, Chinese New Year, and I enjoyed it so much I’m writing this review in the afterglow. This funny, intimate character study takes place in a credible near-future soft dystopia—I realized about halfway through that I’m in the same rough age cohort as protagonist Alton Tapscott, so it’s in my interest to pay attention to the world O’Banion creates. Pandemics are common, Celebrity Russian Roulette rules the airwaves, a professional wrestler is president, and most of the dogs are robots. Tapscott’s hearing aids read him his messages—which include every Tangipahoa Parish Amber Alert. Perpetually irritated, he lives with his faithful cat Mack, until his deeply awful son Archie tricks him into entering a retirement home. The home turns out to be a Kafkaesque prison—East Germany with bingo—where order is enforced with drugs, tribunals, and therapy sessions with a nun in a hedge maze. The only holiday is Chinese New Year, which takes place every month for the benefit of memory care residents.

[Read Chris Turner-Neal's list of book recommendations for 2022, here.]

In Tapscott, O’Banion pulls off the difficult feat of creating a character who is like Ignatius J. Reilly, but distinct from him. (As a querulous, unfashionable man approaching my own life’s halftime, I took note of this as well.) A man who spends some afternoons drinking frozen margaritas until he feels brave enough to call into radio talk shows, Tapscott is irritable and aloof, but reflective, honest, and prone to declaiming—it’s easy to imagine O’Banion’s wife interrupting the author talking about trendy names or baseball and saying, “Put it in the book.” I would not necessarily want to be seated next to Tapscott (and he might well not want to be placed by me), but I’m firmly on his side. Loyal to his cat and his beliefs, straightforward enough to be truly shocked by callous deceit, the character builds on the archetype of the cranky old man to create a convincing portrait of a big personality unprepared for the diminishments of late life. His escape from the retirement home to attend a baseball game (“The outfield bleachers… were the last bastion of the common man”), only to start a riot and be forcibly ejected, is the closest a modern American can come to a Gilgamesh-style hero’s journey.

Loyal to his cat and his beliefs, straightforward enough to be truly shocked by callous deceit, the character builds on the archetype of the cranky old man to create a convincing portrait of a big personality unprepared for the diminishments of late life. 

[Read Chris Turner-Neal's review of thriller A White Hot Plan, here.]

Chinese New Year isn’t quite a novel you read for the plot, which is episodic and somewhat confusing late in the book—part of the point is that you can’t tell if Tapscott is senile or hopped up on goofballs, but I wound up “wondering if I was supposed to be wondering” rather than exploring this interesting question. (On a potentially self-serving note, I’d also recommend tighter editing: I liked the mental images of “firing a canon” and “the Mississippi River levy,” but they’re not what he meant.) But sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, it’s a hoot. Baton Rouge is the “tuna fish salad of America’s quasi-metropolises.” The people of Louisiana are “as ambitious as an upturned turtle.” Tapscott is revealed to have been widowed by a high-velocity self-returning shopping cart. It’s clear that O’Banion enjoyed himself writing this book, a pleasure he transmits to the reader. In closing, I can offer two final pieces of honest praise: I’m not sure which friend I most want to pass my heavily dogeared copy to, and I will read O’Banion’s next book. 

Learn more about O'Banion, and purchase Chinese New Year, at ceobanion.com.