Mending Bodies

Hon (The Kite Family) offers an unsettling fable about an extreme form of cohabitation. The unnamed narrator, an adrift student with worsening insomnia, is working on her dissertation about conjoined humans throughout history. She lives in a thinly veiled Hong Kong where the Conjoinment Act has incentivized citizens to surgically meld with another person. The act was driven by economic motivations (it’s created a bustling new market for conjoined-friendly products) and political ones, as it serves to “make citizens forget about their long campaign for the city’s independence.” When the narrator’s dissertation adviser encourages her to familiarize herself with her subjects’ experiences, she enlists in a body-matching program and eventually commits to a conjoinment surgery. The account of the narrator’s growing self-estrangement is interspersed with excerpts from her research paper, which probes the “simultaneous coveting and fear of interdependence with another human body.” The novel’s broad exploration of its many themes—including bodily autonomy and privacy—can give the narrative a diffuse and portentous quality. Still, Hon’s turns of phrase are consistently arresting (“The self proliferates as incessantly as mold”). This intelligent speculative work is eerily transfixing. (Apr.)