Gold by the Inch: A Novel

by Lawrence Chua

Overview

Called "striking" by The New York Times Book Review, Gold by the Inch is the story of a young New Yorker of Asian descent who has returned to the country of his birth following a disastrous relationship and his father's death. In a Bangkok drunk on the nation's financial miracle - and high on an assortment of other things - the narrator meets Thong, a young, beautiful male hustler who works at a nightclub. As his romantic obsession with Thong grows, the narrator tries to convince himself that it transcends its commercial nature, but he is quickly forced into a hard look at the connections between desire and exploitation, personal and national identity. Lawrence Chua vividly combines Southeast Asia's troubled history with evocations of its modern face - its polyglot culture, its colonial past, the cool futurism of its skyscrapers and its sex industry. Written in hard-bitten, dazzling prose, Gold by the Inch is a stunning debut.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802136497
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	09/13/1999
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.25(h) x (d)

What People are Saying About This

Jessica Hagedorn

Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dogeaters and The Gangster of Love
Set in present—day Bangkok, Lawrence Chua's mean, lean Gold by the Inch unfolds in a rush of edgy, brilliant images and dances on the dark side of life, loss, sexual passion, cultural conflict, and hard commerce.

Editorial Reviews

Like surrendering to a beautiful body you know will be cruel to you, Lawrence Chua reveals the story in the edgy, soft logic akin to dreams and memory. -- Lambda Book Report

Therese Murdza

A clever challenge to Marguerite Duras's "The Lover", this first novel by journalist Chua updates the time-honored themes of empire and eroticism. In a stream of precise prose in which "even the mess has an intellectual clarity," the narrator, a nameless, precocious 23-year-old gay New Yorker, lands in his native Thailand after a 13-year absence and a painful breakup with his American lover. Recovering with drugs and debauchery in the discos of Bangkok, he quickly falls for a beautiful, privileged prostitute named Thon and ends up living with Thon's wealthy family until the affair comes to an inevitable, unhappy end. Chua's prose is sensuous, often feverish, studded with vivid images: we're hearing, the narrator notes, "the sound of time eating its own children." Despite the sadness of his subject and the grimness of his historical imagination, the narrator's restless curiosity survives his romantic disillusionments. "I love you because your body is expensive," he says near the end of the novel. In Chua's debut, love always comes with a calculable pricetag, whether or not it can be paid in cash.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this gritty and revealing first novel, a 23-year-old gay male of Thai descent returns to his homeland, known for its thriving sex industry, where anything and anyone can be purchased for a price, to escape life and be with family following the death of his father and a failed relationship back in New York. The narrator takes the reader along with him on a dark journey into the nightclubs, where his evenings are often filled with sex, drugs, overindulgence, and obsession. Writing in the first and second person, Chua gives readers a true sense of his protagonist's complex struggles. His wayward journey becomes the narrator's quest for love and understanding. The images are often graphic and disturbing, giving this story a hard and realistic edge. Ultimately, Chua's novel serves as a commentary on life in a society vastly different from our own. Well recommended but not for all collections. Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty P.L., Fountain Valley, CA

Library Journal

A sparse, fragmented style which sometimes resembles the gliding poetic prose of Marguerite Duras…The author's real talent is to lay bare the narrator's heart, his confused, winded craving for someone he can never possess.
—The Village Voice Literary Suppliment

Evelyn Lau

Imagery suggesting the-urban-jungle-is-hell-nor-are-we-out-of-it threatens to suffocate a frenetic first novel about an Asian-born architect's return from America to his native Thailand. The unnamed narrator is 23, gay, and intermittently guilty for having willfully separated from his family (with whom he had emigrated to America) and bitter about his country's transformation into a glitter palace buoyed by a booming economy and riddled with drugs, booze, and beautiful people whose bodies are for hire. Chua's fragmented narrative juxtaposes these concerns against his protagonist's awareness of his own moral deterioration, which takes the form of his infatuation with a gorgeous but somewhat distracted male prostitute, Thon (he of the "face that inspires a thousand plane tickets, a million visa bribes"). A number of the story's particulars are indeed compelling: for example, the history of violent behavior that has threaded its way through the narrator's family, climaxing with his scapegrace father's dementia and death, and the mysterious unexplained demise of his grandmother, who may have been murdered (though this later information rather too nakedly emblemizes a distorted ethnic heritage.) There's also a potentially fascinating subtheme implied by the narrator's intuition that the body expresses the spirit of its desires exactly as architecture expresses that of a city—but the concept is left in an essentially inchoate state. The novel is further burdened with barely fictionalized jeremiads condemning injustices perpetrated by colonialist exploitation ("The British Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century was essentially a drug cartel"). The idea of an architect whocan't impose order on his experiences and emotions is a promising one, and the narrator's pain and outrage seem real enough—but Chua's first fiction flies in too many directions at once to engage the reader's interest fully.

Kirkus Reviews