Review: Lies and Weddings, by Kevin Kwan
by Rich Horton
Kevin Kwan was born in Singapore, to a family of Chinese descent. (I had a friend in college from Singapore, who was of Thai descent, and who was rather resentful of the Chinese Singaporeans, who apparently were dismissive of other ethnicities.) Kwan's family was pretty prominent, and so he surely had connections to the very wealthy people he writes about in his novels, though I don't know that his family was all that well off, though they seem to have been comfortable. His family moved to the US, to Texas, when he was 11. Aspects of his autobiography show up in Crazy Rich Asians, and also in Lies and Weddings, and I suspect in his other novels as well -- which is not to say that they are truly autobiographical novels.
(I mostly read this novel as an audiobook, and I'll note that I wasn't entirely happy with the narration, by Jing Lusi. The main issue is a matter of taste -- some of the voices the narrator adopted for the characters were downright annoying, and not the ones that were supposed to be annoying. (That is to say, the main antagonist, Lady Arabella, has an annoying voice that I thought worked very well.))
Lies and Weddings opens in the 1990s in Hong Kong, at a wild party. A young man, flush with money after a gambling trip to Macau, proposes to the beautiful Gabrielle Soong -- only to be confronted by one of his friends, Reggie Gao -- resulting in the accidental death of the first man in the ensuing scuffle. It's soon clear that Reggie was defending the honor of his sister, who had been the first man's girlfriend and who was pregnant by him.
Focus shifts a couple of decades into the future, to England. Eden Tong is a young doctor, of Chinese descent, living with her father in a small house on the estate of her father's friend Francis Gresham, the Earl of Greshamsbury. Eden is close friends with the Earl's three children, Rufus, Augusta, and Beatrice. But for some reason she has not been invited to Augusta's upcoming wedding in Hawaii. Eden doesn't much mind -- her medical schedule is demanding, and a trip to Hawaii would be expensive. But we soon realize that she hasn't been invited because the Countess of Greshamsbury, Lady Arabella, who is also of Chinese descent, doesn't quite approve of Eden, for snobbish reasons: in essence, she isn't good enough to be real friends with the children of an Earl.
But Augusta and Bea conspire to get Eden and her father, Dr. Thomas Tong, invited anyway. And we get to witness an absurdly extravagant wedding -- for the ambitious Lady Arabella, a former model and now a hotel entrepreneur, wants to outshine all her super wealthy friends, and has planned a fabulous party at a resort she owns on the Big Island. But amidst all the glorious meals and remarkable spectacles, Mother Nature has her way with things: a fissure opens up complete with lava and the wedding party is ruined, along with Arabella's resort. Beyond that, the time Eden has spent with Rufus on this trip makes it clear the two, friends since childhood, are truly in love -- and what's worse, Rufus's declaration of love is accidentally broadcast -- and Arabella hears it. Much worse still, the loss of her resort, which it turns out is uninsured, lays bare the fact that the Greshamsbury fortune has been entirely wasted. The Earl's indulgence of Arabella's dreams has caused him to take out numerous loans -- to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds -- many of which are held by the rapacious Filipino billionaire Rene Tan.
The novel continues rather giddily on what seems almost a world tour. Eden, who has convinced herself that she has no future with Rufus anyway, is slandered by the furious Lady Arabella, and as a result loses her job and basically also her home. Lady Arabella plots to marry Rufus -- an aspiring artist -- off to a successful artist who is also, of course, an aristocrat. The financial issues of the Greshams, however, lead to the quick end of Augusta's marriage, and to, in Arabella's mind, the need for Rufus to marry someone fabulously rich, and it so happens that her aunt knows just the woman, a Hong Kong tycoon named Martha Dung. Eden, meanwhile, heads to Los Angeles at the behest of a pleasant but rather silly young Persian-American who is infatuated with her -- and there she encounters Rene Tan's profoundly dissolute son Luis Felipe. Eden's father, it turns out, it Rene Tan's personal physician -- he's been working heroically to keep Tan alive, but his efforts may soon fail. There are trips to Paris, Marrakech, Houston, Venice, and elsewhere, in every case accompanied by lush descriptions of fabulous meals, extravagant houses, expensive cars (and boats, and aircraft), and a great deal of appalling waste. And there are mysteries -- in particular about Thomas Tong's obligations to Rene Tan and about Eden's own history.
All of this is resolved in satisfying (if somewhat predictable and perhaps a bit hasty) fashion. The novel is slickly written, fun to read. Kevin Kwan is overtly aware of the enormous privilege, and accompanying grotesque unfairness, that all of his characters enjoy. The book comes off a bit uneasy about this -- the descriptions of luxury are often quite alluring, and the way the approved characters (mostly Eden, Rufus, and Martha) portray their moral goodness frankly comes off almost perfunctory, and sometimes a bit oblivious, as when Eden refuses to wear the spectacularly expensive gown Bea gives her at Augusta's wedding and instead hurries to buy something off the rack which of course is amazingly perfect, and by a famous designer, and probably not exactly cheap, and fits her perfectly so she can throw it on just in time for the wedding. All the characters are extremely beautiful -- for example Eden, the hardworking comparatively poor NHS doctor, reveals that she had been approached to be a model, but refused because she knew Arabella would be mad if she outshone Augusta or Beatrice (or even Arabella herself), and Rufus is presented as having had more or less every woman in the world (including Eden and Martha) have a crush on him due to a shirtless photo taken when he was 16.
By which I mean, really, that this is a confection -- a work of popular fiction that is there mostly to entertain, and that does so quite nicely -- with a side serving of satire of the idle rich -- and by rich I don't just mean comfortable, I mean obscenely so. Kwan also deals with anti-Asian racism, as might be expected. But -- I've left out a key aspect of the novel, an aspect that was probably missed by a good many readers, but which is quite obvious -- and overtly signaled -- to a certain set of readers. For Lies and Weddings is a contemporary retelling of Anthony Trollope's novel Doctor Thorne. (And I understand that his previous novel, Sex and Vanity, is a retelling of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View.)
Contemporary retellings can sometimes be tedious, sometimes lame, sometimes tendentious. But sometimes they can work, and I think Lies and Weddings works. It's not that Kwan is as good a writer as Trollope, nor that Lies and Weddings is as good as Doctor Thorne. But Lies and Weddings is a fun read, and it's also fun for an admirer of Doctor Thorne to read. It's interesting to follow the ways in which Kwan uses the trellis provided by Doctor Thorne -- the ways he maps Trollope's characters to contemporary people, the tweaks he makes to the plot, even the structural changes he makes.
The reader of Doctor Thorne will immediately unravel a key mystery in Lies and Weddings, though the funny thing is that this mystery really isn't a mystery at all in the original novel. (Kwan's restructuring of the novel's timeline is aimed at hiding this secret -- I do wonder, though, if non-Trollopean readers of Kwan's novel will still figure things out -- I suspect they may. (My wife might read the book and I'll ask her.)) Trollope's readers will also notice the similar names -- all the Greshams except Rufus have the same name they had in Doctor Thorne. There are other namedrops that aren't terribly important but work as gracenotes -- there's a Palliser mention, and a minor character named Courcy, and even a Doctor Fillgrave.
Status in Doctor Thorne was more closely tied to family position than to money, though money certainly counted. (Money always counts in Trollope.) But no one in that novel is so absurdly rich as the people in Lies and Weddings (except perhaps the Duke of Omnium.) Money counts first by far in Kwan's novel, and ethnicity counts next -- in England, Asians face distinct obstacles, which goes a good way towards explaining Lady Arabella's awfulness. Dr. Thomas Thorne in Doctor Thorne comes from a minor family in what might be called the Squirearchy, and as such is "below" the Greshams and far below the de Courcys. So Dr. Thomas Tong in Lies and Marriages is disrespected not just because he's not as rich as the Greshams, but because he's Chinese in origin. The novel is pretty clear that while Thomas and Eden and Arabella all encounter racism, it has a somewhat minor effect on them, given that they are pretty well off. The novel does show one or two examples of poorer people (hotel maids, one aspiring artist) who are more directly impacted.
The specific plot turns are also fun to follow for a reader of Doctor Thorne. The stain of illegitimacy is less important in Kwan's novel, but he finds a way to make it make sense. There is a particular character in Doctor Thorne who is a favorite with many readers, and looking for that character-equivalent is also fun. (She's quite amusing in Lies and Marriage, though I'll confess not quite as satisfying for me as in Trollope's novel.) Lady Arabella in Trollope is awful in a different way to Lady Arabella in Kwan, but Kwan makes her machinations work in the present day. One way in which Kwan's novel may be superior is in the two main characters. Mary Thorne is a lovely and virtuous young woman, but Eden Tong is given more agency than Mary, and I really liked her -- lots of this is of course due to social change. Likewise Rufus is far more active and determined than the rather dithering Frank Gresham Jr. Kwan is not as engaging a writer as Trollope, and not a master like the Victorian was in control of the omniscient point of view, but he does some nice stuff, notably with sardonic footnotes, which seem like a clever way to do something similar to the way Trollope as narrator talks to his readers. (Even if the one footnote in which he sort of mansplains to us how Spam became popular in Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific due to World War II struck me as unnecessary.)
Bottom line -- Lies and Weddings is good fun, and it's not necessary to know its antecedent to enjoy it, but knowing Doctor Thorne may make it even better. I don't know how well Sex and Vanity does in echoing A Room with a View, but I am fine with Kevin Kwan using this strategy.
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