Beauty Plus Pity (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781551524160)

"Beauty plus pity--that is the closest we can get to a definition of art."--Vladimir Nabokov

In this tragicomic modern immigrant's tale, Malcolm Kwan is a slacker twentysomething Asian-Canadian living in Vancouver who is about to embark on a modelling career when his life is suddenly derailed by two near-simultaneous events: the death of his filmmaker father, and the betrayal of his fiancée who has left him. Soon he meets Hadley, the half-sister he never knew existed?the result of his father's extramarital affair?and as their tentative relationship grows, Malcolm is forced to confront his past relationships with women, including his own mother, an art teacher working through her grief as well as her resentment at her son befriending her husband's daughter.

Written with a winsome yet plaintive eye, Beauty Plus Pity is about a young man who's forced to reckon with the past as he works through his lifelong ambivalence toward his hyphenated cultural identity, and between two parents holding intolerable secrets.

Kevin Chong is the author of the novel Baroque-a-Nova (Plume) and the memoir Neil Young Nation (Greystone Books).


Author: Kevin Chong
ISBN-10: 1551524163
ISBN-13: 9781551524160
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Language: English
Published: 09/20/2011
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.40w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/18/2011
Quill & Quire 09/01/2011 pg. 27