But it is also radiant, softly glowing as if lit from within. Zhang’s writing is careful, faceted, gleaming in its insight and meticulous observation, its beautiful sentences. We learn about the break, see how these two young women formed each other, trace how they fell apart. And then, we travel back in time to the center of this story, the terrible, transformative bestfriendship-and eventually, rupture-between Esther and Julia. Staring after their departing forms, she recognizes something “horrible and familiar” in how they move together. In the process of bidding her old haunts goodbye in a manner at once self-conscious, sentimental, and controlled, she collides with two college-aged women coming out of the bodega who laugh at her reflexive apology. In “Julia,” a thirty-two-year-old woman named Esther embarks upon leaving New York City after a ten-year stay. Zhang, a winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, writes with the care and insight, craftmanship and wisdom, of an artist more than twice her age. The Sorrows of Others is a pristine and lovingly carved jewel box of a collection, set in China and America in the post-Cultural Revolution decades. okay, sure.īut it was all true in fact, I came to the end of Sorrows feeling the book had not been praised enough. I was a thirsty traveler in the desert when I was sent Ada Zhang’s short story collection, The Sorrows of Others. Maybe you, privately or not, feel this way too. So much contemporary literary fiction! The vast majority of it competent, a lot of it quite good, so little of it truly beautiful or memorable or alive. Specifically, I am curmudgeonly regarding the matter of actually great fiction. Though I try to be generous in most areas of my life, in some of the quieter recesses of my heart I indulge the joys of being a hater.
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