Review: A city mouse from Kuala Lumpur falls for a country mouse in ‘The South’

If all the world’s a stage, it must include the 20 hectares of barren, dusty and drought-stricken Malaysian farmland at the center of Tash Aw’s sensitively drawn novel “The South.”

This failing acreage, with its muddy pond and orchard destined for the chainsaw, seems an unlikely setting for a novel, especially one centered on teen angst and the budding of young love.

Aw, a Malaysian writer living in London, peoples this unpromising rural backdrop with a small cast, favoring atmospherics over incident. His modest approach is affecting, and sometimes mesmerizing. Imagine “The White Lotus,” minus its narrative steroids.

Here, depth arrives gradually, as chapters alternate between a primary, first-person narration by 16-year-old Jay and the third-person perspectives of his mother and others, including Fong, the longtime manager of the farm.

On a family holiday, Jay, his two older sisters and their parents (Jack and Sui) drive south from the capital of Kuala Lumpur to check on the farm, which has been willed to his mother by her late father-in-law. It is the late 1990s, when an Asian financial crisis has devalued currencies and created widespread economic uncertainty.

Teenage desire occurs as predictably as citrus on a tree, even in a world beset by corruption, recession, drought and pollution. Jay develops a crush on Fong’s son, Chuan — who, at 19, is handsome but hardly a brilliant prospect, having dropped out of high school to help at the farm and work at a 7-Eleven in a nearby town. City-raised Jay, whose father teaches mathematics, is himself a middling student with dim college hopes — “totally ordinary,” in the words of one of his teachers.

Thrown into farm work by his father, who thinks it will toughen him up, Jay finds he likes it, that he is “beginning to make sense of the land.” Chuan, meanwhile, boasts about how he can’t wait to move to the big city.

Chuan returns Jay’s affection without the macho posing we might expect from him. Bullied for his possible queerness by peers at a night market in town, Chuan backs down instead of getting into a predictable fistfight. Right from the start, he tells Jay he wants to be with him forever

That “forever,” even if arising from teenage naivete, shows time to be Aw’s recurring theme. There are the ravages the years have wrought on Fong and the farm where he has worked his whole life, and the regrets Jay’s mother feels about her spouse, who is 15 years older than she, their long-ago wedding described as “not so much a union but a collision.”

Jay has a peak experience with Chuan at a gorgeously rendered night market, filled with lights, music, spicy food and cold beer, prompting him to think “I couldn’t believe it repeated every evening, even when I was not here; and I felt a sort of loss for all the moments in the past I’d missed, and all the times in the future when I would be elsewhere.”

The novelist (whose other books include “Five Star Billionaire,” a Booker Prize nominee) is reluctant to engage standard plotlines. He reveals, but never pursues, the fact that Jack and Fong are, in fact, half-brothers; an unsatisfying omission. But rather than piling on twists like a Netflix miniseries, Aw develops a story that is more universal: about land ownership, the shadings of class and ethnic difference, legacy, globalism, youth and love.

Claude Peck is a former Star Tribune editor and columnist.

The South

By: Tash Aw.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 282 pages.