Review: A deftly written post-9/11 tale of refugee and immigrant life in Middle America

First novel ‘Short Girls’ a modern immigrant tale

“Short Girls” (Viking, 292 pages, $25.95), by Bich Minh Nguyen: Bich Minh Nguyen enriches her first novel with such incisive personal and cultural observations that she creates a whole much greater than its parts.

“Short Girls” draws on some of the same experiences and imagery as Nguyen’s well-reviewed memoir, “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.” There are ample helpings of takeout food, television and post-9/11 ennui and disillusionment. The East and West coasts remain remote; the terrain, the weather and Michigan’s variations on assimilation and social segregation are clear.

Nguyen never falls prey to the disdain many novelists show for contemporary life, which helps give her immigrant narrative a quintessentially American cast — not just Asian American.

Sure, Van and Linny, the two daughters of a former refugee couple from Vietnam, stand as representatives for enduring types in Asian America: Van is a hidebound and depressed achiever in a marriage where love and even sex play small roles. Linny is wilder, more stylish — an underachiever but still family oriented. Both are short, both lonely as they near age 30 and both seeking more.

But Nguyen deftly alternates between the daughters’ perspectives as they cope with mainstream American life, and the women’s triumphs and failures don’t ultimately have as much to do with their background as the future they’re hurtling toward as Americans. For Van, there’s law school, then a high-end tract home with a husband who asserts his support for her while deriding her and making her feel controlled. Linny has a sputtering college career and even more questionable love life but an unexpected devotion to cooking and tradition.

Their father, a frequently unemployed floor tiler, is so preoccupied with his height and theirs — and possibly with his regret at abandoning Vietnam — that he occasionally becomes two-dimensional. He spends most of his time working up three inventions: an “arm” for short people to grasp objects out of reach, a periscopic “eye” to help them see in a crowd and a set of shelves that move.

But, in mangling Randy Newman’s song “Short People,” the father finally asserts an appealing, if unexamined, quest for meaning. “Some people say short people are no reason to live,” he tells the judges assessing candidates for a reality show about inventors. “But I say short people have many reasons for becoming happy.”

Despite some references to immigration law and current events that feel more like intrusions than context, “Short Girls” is ultimately optimistic — and written with an admirably light touch.