Review: Thao Thai’s debut novel, “Banyan Moon,” is an intimate account of one family’s planting of roots in American soil and the sacrifices great and small that each member makes along the way.
,” a debut novel by the Vietnamese American writer Thao Thai, nho also proves to be a double-barreled proposition. The multigenerational saga circles around the lives of the Tran women, moving from 1960s Vietnam to present-day Florida, where the two younger members — mother Huong and daughter Ann — have been uneasily united after the passing of grandmother Minh, a refugee of the Vietnam War.
Banyan House, the imposing Florida childhood home of both Huong and Ann, plays a pivotal role in bringing these women back together. When the novel begins, Ann is living with her tenure-track professor boyfriend in Michigan. She discovers she’s pregnant — and that her boyfriend has been unfaithful. The realization sends her into an existential spiral, so she decides to take up temporary residence at Banyan House, where she’s joined by her estranged mother.
Banyan trees, which give the house its name, are also called strangler figs. “They’re called that because they smother other trees,” Ann notes. “Homicidal, sentient trees” is how another character jokingly refers to them. The image makes for a neat — perhaps too neat — metaphor for the tentacular reach of memories passed down the maternal line. As one character glosses: “I come from a tribe of women who are ravaged and joyous, loud, raging, tied to our own convoluted histories.
The fungibility of characters owes something to the book’s fairy-tale-like quality; Thai often blends the mundane and the magical, from the book’s title, derived from a Vietnamese fable, to descriptions that liken characters to witches. Yet, for all its nods to mystical realms, the book is strongest when it latches onto the visceral beauty of the everyday.
Rhoda Feng writes about theater and books for the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, Frieze and Vogue.
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