REFERENCES TO DE PALMA & LYNCH STREWN THROUGHOUT
Publishers Weekly's Matt Seidel includes an upcoming novel by Abraham Chang in an article headlined, "Writers to Watch: 10 Promising Fiction Debuts, Spring 2024" -
Describing his days as a 20-something singer-songwriter in New York City during the 2000s, Abraham Chang riffs on Wordsworth’s famous dictum about poetry being emotion recollected in tranquility. “I didn’t have that tranquility,” he adds, “so I was just getting my feelings out.”888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers (Flatiron, May), Chang’s ebullient debut, is anything but tranquil. Praised by Flatiron v-p and editorial director Zachary Wagman for its “infectious energy,” the novel follows Young Wang, a Chinese American coming of age in late-1990s Queens, N.Y., who views the world through his idiosyncratic brand of numerology. A helpful glossary explains the properties of various numbers from one to 888 according to Chinese tradition and/or Young’s personal taste (19, an example of the latter case due to its significance in Stephen King’s oeuvre, stands for “GOOD”).
Young learns to embrace the inherent chaos of the world from his globe-trotting uncle and his gleefully coarse girlfriend. Each chapter begins with a “soundtrack,” and Chang, a first-generation Chinese American who grew up on a “constant diet of Western pop culture,” strews references to films by David Lynch and Brian De Palma throughout, hoping to please the “pop culture geeks who are going to catch every Easter egg.”