Fiction
People We Meet on Vacation
In her debut novel, “You Can’t Stay Here Forever,” Katherine Lin follows a young widow and her best friend to the French Riviera.
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YOU CAN’T STAY HERE FOREVER, by Katherine Lin
The Shady Husband Mystery is its own literary subgenre, in which industrious wives unspool their missing or otherwise absent spouses’ misdeeds. Notable titles include Laura Dave’s best seller turned Apple TV+ series, “The Last Thing He Told Me,” and Liane Moriarty’s “The Husband’s Secret.” Katherine Lin enters the canon with her debut novel, “You Can’t Stay Here Forever,” which opens with the consummate “good girl” attorney Ellie Huang Anderson smarting from the sudden loss of her “golden boy” husband, Ian Anderson, in a car accident.
“I was waiting for the J train when I found out my husband was dead,” Lin’s striking first sentence reads.
What follows, however, is not a caper trying to crack another case of spousal shadiness. That Ian had a mistress is stated plainly on the book’s jacket copy, along with the fact that said mistress, Cat, is Ellie’s colleague at a prestigious firm in San Francisco. Instead, Lin expends more narrative energy interrogating Ellie’s inner life than Ian’s infidelity, crafting a subtle, character-driven story about interracial marriage (Ellie is Taiwanese American and Ian was white), opposites-attract friendship (her bestie, Mable Chou, isn’t afraid to speak her mind) and a love/hate relationship with her wannabe-blue-blood mother, Mary, with varying degrees of success.
Through memories, Lin skillfully reveals Ellie and Ian’s marriage of contrasts: At Stanford Law, she trounced him academically, while he coasted on charm. Later, Ian parlays his popularity into a partnership post while, socially, Ellie flounders at her firm. Lin mentions the allure of Ian’s privilege during their courtship — “I could live inside his eyes forever, transformed into someone I always wanted to be” — but even in flashbacks meant to be flattering, Ian seems unremarkable and flat. “He wanted me, all of me, including my mind,” Lin writes, though it never believably reads that way, especially as Ian’s insecurities flare.
It’s hard to mourn the death of a character you barely cared about (or liked) in the first place, but being underwhelmed by Ian meant I fully supported Ellie exacting a form of financial revenge: In an uncharacteristically impulsive move, she spends her late husband’s life-insurance check on a decadent trip to the famed Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera, with Mable in tow. (The playground of the 1 percent is the novel’s titular “here,” though it takes a bit too long — almost 100 pages — to get there.) Using an “irresponsible” amount of money to escape her bleak reality is more Mable than Ellie, and that’s exactly the point: You can become a different person on vacation.
Ellie and Mable see each other, and themselves, in new and sometimes unwelcome lights when they form an uneasy foursome with another pair: the enigmatic, thrice-married Fauna (last name unclear) and her younger boyfriend, Robbie Chu. In terms of identity, they’re an inverse of Ellie and Ian: Fauna is white and Robbie is Asian American. While Mable clamors to connect with Fauna, Ellie and Robbie bond as “the kind of people who were defined in contrast to those around us.”
Lin is deft and never overbearing in her handling of race: “It’s not always easy. To be with someone white,” Robbie says.
“I feel that way when I’m not dating someone white. It’s just the world we live in,” Ellie replies. “Always having to engage with whiteness, at a minimum.”
In changing her surname, Ellie “erased” herself “on two fronts,” Mable tells her: “as a woman and as an Asian American woman.”
At times, “You Can’t Stay Here Forever” drifts listlessly through the aftermath of Ian’s death. There aren’t clearly drawn, propulsive questions in its pages. Will Ellie survive the loss of her husband? I never doubted it. Will she quit her soul-crushing Big Law job? Maybe. Lin’s language can be overly detached and spare: “I cried and cried and when they put him in the ground I ran up to the coffin,” Ellie says of Ian’s funeral. Fleetingly describing the Eden-Roc clientele as “clearly wealthy and very attractive” felt like a missed opportunity to immerse the reader in a sumptuous landscape. Then again, it’s stylistically fitting — as stunned and numb as grief itself.
Michelle Ruiz is a contributing editor at Vogue.
YOU CAN’T STAY HERE FOREVER | By Katherine Lin | 288 pp. | Harper | $28.99