If ever there was a time to dust off Tolstoy’s chestnut about happy and unhappy families, now would be it — even if he was mistaken. Misery operates under its own set of cliches. Spouses are unfaithful, fathers and sons struggle for dominance, and children inevitably disappoint their parents. Young people dream of escaping small towns and reinventing themselves in big cities. Love triangles abound. It may seem that there’s little left to surprise a reader.
But if the underlying themes are evergreen, why not repurpose and reinterpret old stories? James Joyce and the Coen Brothers gave us two very different versions of Homer’s Odyssey, both brilliant. And Lan Samantha Chang has now aired out Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, and adapted it for the modern reader as effortlessly as one of Shakespeare’s tragedies or a novel by Jane Austen. The Family Chao is an appealing reimagining of a literary masterpiece. Chang takes a story about 19th-century Russian brothers and transforms it into a tale about the American children of Chinese immigrant parents set in the present.
The Chao’s own and operate the Fine Chao restaurant. For 35 years, Leo, the patriarch, and, until recently, his wife Winnie (more on that in a moment) have served authentic Chinese cuisine to friends and neighbors in Haven, Wisconsin. Between customers, they raised three sons. Dagou, the eldest, works in the family business. Ming, the middle son, has a successful career in finance and lives in New York City. The baby of the family, James, is pre-med. Shortly before the book opens, Winnie has left Leo after decades of what was by all accounts a turbulent marriage. She has renounced her worldly possessions and joined a Buddhist monastery. No one blames her. Ming even pays a “dowry” to the Spiritual House to which she retreats. While the Fine Chao restaurant is successful, the Family Chao has begun to pull apart.
Big Leo Chao (the “Big Leo” tells us a lot) is many things: self-centered, arrogant, obnoxious, a terrible father, and a worse husband. When Dagou expresses the desire to be made partner and eventually take over the Fine Chao, Big Leo responds by mocking him. He refuses to acknowledge that Dagou is a talented cook and the obvious choice to take over. He refuses to admit that he had asked Dagou to come home six years earlier to help out when Winnie became sick and promised to pay him $50,000 when his help was no longer needed.
Dagou, not one to give up, tries to force his father’s hand by arranging a public meeting with the Abbess, Ghu Ling Zhu Chi, at his mother’s Buddhist Spiritual House. She is one of the few people whose opinion Big Leo seems to respect. Dagou asks his brothers, who are home for Christmas, to attend and support him against his father. It’s pointless. Leo belittles him in front of the community – despite the Abbess and reinforcements – calling him a failure, a loser, and claiming it is Dagou who owes Big Leo money in back rent. Leo announces his plans to sell the Fine Chao to a stranger as a parting shot.
How many people still read The Brothers Karamazov? It’s a big ask. Dostoevsky was paid by the word for the novel’s serialization in a magazine over a period of almost two years. It was a common practice, and he wouldn’t be the first writer accused of padding. The 1990 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, arguably the most palatable to current sensibilities, runs 796 pages.
Even for those undaunted by the length, the style may be a barrier to entry. His preoccupation with the Russian Christian Orthodox faith, his characters’ constant agitation, and the endless philosophical monologues they engage in might have made perfect sense to his Russian readers. Today, those characters and their internal struggles feel overwrought. Their behaviors embody the most extreme versions of themselves. Dostoevsky’s preoccupations become a burden in a plot simultaneously depicted as both tragedy and farce. Also, a lot of nonsense inexplicably occurs.
Chang manages to remove both obstacles. Her book is less than half the length of the original. She leans heavily into the murder plot and its psychological impact on her characters. Her prose is clean but not crisp — the editorial equivalent of auto-tuning. The resulting text feels produced (keeping to the music industry metaphor) without being over-manipulated. There are no distracting idiosyncrasies. Which is to say: The Family Chao is as much a novel of this era as The Brothers Karamazov was of its:
“Ming can remember. Six years older than James, he has had firsthand experience of things James will only hear about. James has the crushing sense that he was born too late to understand the real story of the Chaos – that the great passions, the bedrock promises and betrayals that formed the basis of whatever lies among the members of his family, have long since taken place.”
Undaunted by his father’s scorn (the character remains tenacious in both versions), Dagou decides to take control of the family’s annual Christmas party in a misguided attempt to prove himself. He hopes to impress Big Leo and Brenda, the town temptress, whom he’s been infatuated with since high school — despite his engagement to Katharine, his college sweetheart, for over a decade.
This was always a complicated plot, cluttered by digressions. So much happens in a short period, including murder. Leo Chao’s body is discovered the day after the party. No one in or reading either book feels particularly bad about this turn of events. There’s no subtlety regarding his character. The man was a jerk. When his estranged wife suffers from a stroke, he is more concerned that their gathered friends and family acknowledge his empathy more than her condition. His death brings his family closer together with the same force as his presence wedged it apart. Dagou is charged with patricide, and the three brothers and two women in his life rally to exonerate him. There is a trial, which forms the second half of the book. There is also the matter of $50,000 that have gone missing and the disappearance of the family dog.
If you haven’t read Dostoevsky’s original, you won’t experience the fissures of pleasure when you encounter one of the surprising choices Chang makes. How meticulously she follows the plot outline. And the skill with which she strips away the frenzied outbursts and strange hysteria that typify the Russian characters’ interactions. Chang applies logic to their emotions and reimagines their motivations. The youngest brother, James, is a virgin — still innocent, just less annoying than his fictional ancestor. The middle Karamazov brother, Ivan, who struggled with atheism in a society dominated by Christianity, becomes Ming, financially successful and “filled with self-hatred.” He doesn’t date Asian women but secretly loves Katherine, Dagou’s long-suffering fiancé. Katherine is adopted and “raised as racially Chinese in a well-meaning but white American family.” Dagou and the Chao family connect Katherine to her heritage, her “Chinese identity,” which goes a long way towards explaining her refusal to release him from their engagement. It certainly makes more sense than the behavior of the Russian Katerina, who holds on to Dmitri because he once loaned her money without forcing her to sleep with him.
Even the tweaks Chang makes have a significant impact on the overall tone — such as moving the most famous scene in The Brothers Karamazov, a conversation between the middle and youngest brother, here Ming and James, to the only other restaurant in Haven, a diner owned by the Skaer family, who terrorized the Chao boys in school.
“This is like that riddle about the town with two barbers,” Ming says as James approaches. “You go to ta small town with only two barbers. One of the barbers has a bad haircut. If you and I want privacy, we’re doomed to a shitty meal.”
But for those coming to this story with fresh eyes, the fun will be experiencing it as it unfolds. The plot plays out like a true-crime podcast. Chang keeps her focus on the complicated family relationships, particularly between the siblings. By converting Dostoevsky’s siblings into first-generation American children of Chinese parents raised in a small midwestern town and taking a candid look at the baggage that comes with it, Chang adds complexity to what could have been a shallow retelling of a classic novel. She also puts an interesting twist on the murderer.
My constant to reference The Brothers Karamazov may seem unfair. But to ignore it is to let Chang’s accomplishment go unrecognized. She has willingly tied her writing to what many consider one of the greatest books ever written. Neither her confidence and ambition are misplaced. But she also recognizes the need to scale the monument back to something manageable. Paring back the opulence, purging the story of extraneous characters, plot points, and those all too frequent digressions, she explores the one theme that transcends epochs — an idea that emotionally binds us together, whether genetically or by choice: family, alternately the most beautiful and terrible thing in the world.
[Published by W.W. Norton on February 1, 2022, 320 pages, $28.00 hardcover]