The Fetishist Review · 6:36pm Jun 26th, 2024
The Fetishist is a monument to what could have been.
This is an unfinished book. Min abandoned the draft of this novel after finding out she had cancer, and her daughter posthumously pieced the final draft together. If you’re inclined to believe in fate, you may notice an odd parallel between the events of the novel, in which a talented artists is struck low by an incurable disease. Hopefully Min, like her character Alma, found peace in leaving the work unfinished and focusing on her life outside of fiction writing. You only die once! Might as well enjoy it!
I have my qualms with this book, but I want to get the good stuff out of the way first: this was a great read. Min's craft is on another planet. She has this way of funneling chapters, where the scope of her prosefocus gets narrower over the course of the chapter until we reach the end and we're left with usually a single bit of information or imagery that carries all the weight and heat of all the words before it. I love it. Such a cool way to pull readers in and keep them moving from chapter to chapter. The modern landscape of fiction prose is trending towards the expeditious (thanks BookTok). But some trends need to be bucked. Min bucks it with style.
The novel, unfortunately, is incomplete, and noticeably so. The incompleteness manifests in a couple ways: first, in its pacing, and second, in a general sense of jump-around-iness that plagues the book’s final act.
Pacing can be slow and lush. Pacing can be fast and brutal. The Fetishist teases in its first chapter with a botched knife murder before transitioning into a kidnapping/long hostage scenario with a touch of umami-flavored death by fugu. Hell yeah, you might be thinking, I love/generally feel pretty good about/tolerate fast-paced books. Imagine my surprise when, 100ish packages in, Min slams the brakes and throws us back into a meandering flashback about the kidnappee and titular Fetishist's hot and cold love life with his ex wife.
This is not the only time this abrupt tone shift happens, nor is it the most egregious. That prize goes to the book’s ending. Spoiler alert–there’s actually two of them! The first ending sees Daniel returning to his ex wife Alma's side as she attempts to recover from raging MS and an attempted suicide. This is a good ending. Daniel’s reconciliation is earned in his return to Alma’s side, to care for her after her suicide attempt and worsening MS leaves her unable to care for herself. His whole life, his relationship with women has been dictated by his sexual desires, his colonizer-coded lust for asian women. When given the opportunity to prove the love he claims by caring for Alma without the possibility of her giving him sexual gratification, he takes it. Sound vapid? Well, Daniel’s kinda vapid. Small victories can still be victories. It would have been nice to see Daniel prove this love over a longer period of time than the week or so we get in the book–as Daniel Karmody himself proves when he cheats on Alma in the first place, you can lie for a long time with absolute conviction. Love is earned over time–but all in all, this ending was satisfactory.
But this ending isn’t the only ending! Remember?
The second ending takes place immediately after the first ending. It is a jarring four-page flashback to Daniels childhood, flying in from nowhere like an unexpected cancer diagnosis. The final pages upends what was up to this point a delicately constructed narrative about love and race and instead stuffs into our collective mouths a bizarre sexual awakening scene which seems to imply that, while Daniel is a racist asshole, his attraction to asian women was some sort of psychosexual phenomenon completely outside of his control. Young Daniel's character reads like a child possessed. No autonomy. A puppet! Wack!
That bizarre second ending reminded me of something that happens when I’m writing: I’ll draft out a scene, and somewhere along the way I’ll decide that it’s not really worth including in the story. But I like the scene enough that I don’t want to outright delete it. So I hit ctrl+enter a few times and kick it down to the bottom of the google doc, where it will gather cobwebs, never to see the light of day, its author too cowardly to simply kill it off. I’ll never know for sure if this is actually what happened. But reading those last few pages made me feel like what I imagine Daniel felt like after marrying Sigrid: expecting a pineapple cake but getting a cracker. 4/5 stars.
RIP Catherine Min. Thank you for sharing your book with us!
A hell of a review for a what might have been.
Interesting. I dunno if I can schedule it in, but I may read a chapter or two to see what she does. She wrote an earlier book, Secondhand World, published in 2008. She died in 2019, and The Fetishist was published in 2024, and got MUCH much more attention than her first book. How that happened would probably make an interesting story.