Tash Aw's estimable third novel, Five Star Billionaire, takes its title from a fictional self-help book, and its mantras function as chapter titles: "Move to where the money is"; "Reinvent yourself"; "Cultivate an urbane, humorous personality". Some of these mantras are touching, like "Know when to cut your losses".
The novel's setting is Shanghai, circa right now. Mr Aw's five central characters are mostly insecure strivers from the outlands. They're trying to shake their hick accents, their poor postures and their cheap shoes and to make it, by any means necessary, in the big sleek city.
One of these characters, an amoral spa receptionist named Phoebe, shows up for a date at a sophisticated Western restaurant after making a list of things to remember. These include "how to use the cutlery, what to do with the little baskets of bread that arrived before the meal, how to deal with olives". Soon, Phoebe "did not even need to look in her handbag for the piece of paper on which she had written: 1. Soup (+ bread). 2. Fish (flat knife). 3. Meat. 4. Cheese. 5. Dessert. 6. Coffee."
Mr Aw has an eye for status distinctions. There is some Edith Wharton, as well as some Tom Wolfe, in how he invests awareness of these distinctions with moral and financial peril. Five Star Billionaire was recently placed on the long list for the Man Booker Prize, Britain's top literary award, and one of its pleasures is purely sociological. It's a busy yet sophisticated portrait of life in one of the most populous cities on earth.
The primary characters, besides Phoebe, are Gary, a Justin Bieber-like pop singer whose career derails; Yinghui, a free spirit who abandons art for commerce; Justin, the troubled scion of a wealthy family; and Walter, the five-star billionaire himself. Mr Aw weaves these lives together gently, like a man plaiting hair.
Five Star Billionaire is a meditation, at heart, on impermanence. The New China never stands still; to pause for even a moment is to be left behind. "Every village, every city, everything is changing," a young woman says. "It's as if we are possessed by a spirit - like in a strange horror film."
Ambitious rural kids flee to the city; ambitious urbanites, flush with new wealth, flee to see the world. Here is an actress, Zhou X, downloading her funny-prickly sense of the West:
"European food is awful, meat, meat, meat, always in huge burned lumps, often not even cooked. She went to a Chinese restaurant in Paris; the rice was like little plastic pellets. German people are fat. Dutch people are tall. French people are elegant but rude. English people dress very messily. London is dirty but they have nice parks."
Mr Aw's array of characters lets him examine what we used to think of as the American dream, transplanted to China, from multiple angles, some sardonic. "Corruption is quite comforting, really," one character declares. "I mean, it suits us, suits the Asian temperament. Westerners aren't comfortable with it, not just because they have stricter rules in place, but because something in their nature prevents them from appreciating it."
Mr Aw is a patient writer, and an elegant one. His supple yet unshowy prose can resemble Kazuo Ishiguro's. The drawback to the author's measured attack is that Five Star Billionaire is a long book that simmers without ever coming to a boil.
This simmering quality is one that modern readers have grown used to, now that ambitious literary novels so reliably hopscotch among points of view. Our novelists, like our chefs, deliver long sequences of small plates.
Mr Aw was born in Taipei, raised in Malaysia and went to college in England. He's a writer to watch. He works high and low, and is as interesting to read on pop music as he is on finance or sibling rivalry.
His most dazzling creation is Phoebe, the spa receptionist, a self-invented factory girl from Malaysia. When her chapters spin into view, you sit up a bit straighter in your armchair. She leaps from the toaster like a Pop-Tart.
"She had become an expert in the courtship rituals of the internet," Mr Aw observes. "She could tell if a man was lying about who he was, about his job and income, where he was from. She could tell if he was from Beijing or if he was a Pakistani pretending to be from Beijing."
Phoebe is equal parts virgin and dynamo. "Being open and honest with a man," she thinks, "is like asking him to drive over you with a bulldozer!"
Like Yinghui, this book's other prominent female character, she worries about what she might become: "a leftover woman, the dregs, or a shaggy monster waiting to be slayed by the Monkey God."
Everyone in this artful novel is hovering on a precipice. Today's rules are unlikely to be tomorrow's. A mantra from Five Star Billionaire, the self-help book, summons the mood: "Even beautiful things will fade."
©2013 The New York Times News Service
FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE
Tash Aw
Spiegel & Grau
379 pages; $26
