Katie Yee accomplishes something quite impressive with her debut novel, “Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar.” And I’m not talking about the fact that she convinced her publisher to go with an 11-word title that includes a semicolon and a comma. (Though I’m not not talking about that.)
No, I’m referring to this first time novelist writing a truly delightful story about a young mother who, in rapid succession, finds out she has a cheating husband and breast cancer.
These are destabilizing and potentially catastrophic blows in isolation, let alone in tandem, so “Maggie” is definitely not some breezy romp. Yet Yee so deftly leavens the dread and sorrow suffered by her unnamed Chinese American narrator that the focus of the novel becomes survival rather than surrender.
This sleight of hand is achieved partly through disarming plot points, as when the narrator makes the perversely hilarious decision to name the lump in her breast Maggie, after her soon-to-be ex-husband’s new lover, and partly through good old-fashioned humor, much of which is so punny or cheesy that Yee seems to be offering a pointed rejoinder to the primacy of dad jokes. (Dare I say, she’s offering a Yee-joinder? Anyone? No? Moving on...)
Yee’s narrator is a stay-at-home mom, doing the exhausting-yet-rewarding job of raising 8-year-old Noah and his younger sister Lily, in what sounds an awful lot like Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Her husband, Sam, works as a headhunter because he’s able to sell people on alternative lives, one of the book’s many extremely on-the-nose metaphors.
Prior to Sam’s adulterous confession, the marriage had seemed like a storybook romance: Their meet-cute occurred days after the narrator’s mother died, “like maybe the universe was sending me family when I needed it most.” And while they came from different backgrounds — she was raised by blue-collar parents, his family had the kind of money that “obliterated big obstacles” — love conquered, or at least temporarily suppressed, their differences.
In retrospect, the narrator realizes that she’s always felt “a tad inferior,” whether because of those diametric upbringings or just because she envied the creative bedtime stories Sam told the kids. Whenever her genuine soul-searching gets too dark, her best friend Darlene is steadfastly by her side to halt her self-flagellation.
A palpable love of books runs throughout “Maggie,” most memorably manifesting in the fables and fairy tales the narrator starts to share with her children, many of which are drawn from Chinese myths that Yee heard from her own mother growing up. Yee writes with a deceptive nonchalance, hopping freely between the narrator’s reflections on her past and present-day battles, liberally using punctuation in all its incarnations to break up her prose. (The novel’s title is no aberration.)
