Review: Afterparties
Anthony Veasna So
260 pages
Ecco (2021)
Read this if you like: Karen Russell, Jennifer Egan, Alan Heathcock
Tl;dr summary: Various views of the day-to-day lives of Cambodian refugees in California.
My favorite thing about reading fiction is inhabiting a world that it would be impossible to enter otherwise. This what normally draws me to speculative genres, but a book like Afterparties achieves a similar effect. All the stories are rooted in our reality, yes, but a slice of it that I’ve never experienced, seen through perspectives I’ve never heard stories told from before.
That variety of voices made this a very enjoyable collection to read from top to bottom. They strike a nice balance in that regard. All of the voices certainly feel like they belong in the same world, but without reading as too much the same. It helps that it uses a mix of 1st and 3rd POVs (with a smattering of 2nd), shifting the distance for the reader along with the voice and tone.
Across those distinct voices, though, one constant is absolutely lovely descriptive language. These stories are a masterclass in using distinctive, telling details to immerse the reader in very few words. This starts from the collection’s opening sentence:
“The first night the man orders an apple fritter, it is three in the morning, the streetlamp is broken, and California Delta mist obscures the waterfront’s run-down buildings, except for Chuck’s Donuts, with its cool fluorescent glow.”
One sentence (albeit, to be fair, a long sentence) and the reader has a complete world to sink into, firmly grounded in both space and time. Not only is there an impressive amount of worldbuilding packed into that sentence, but it also introduces a mystery that pushes the reader forward into the story. There are moments like this throughout, where the description is so vivid the scene comes to life in your mind like a movie still. It’s definitely worth a read and study for any writers who are working to improve their descriptive language, especially those who want a case study in how to write descriptions that develop characters and establish a tone, voice, or mood at the same time they build a world.
This tight, powerful language gives the stories in Afterparties excellent energy and a quick pace—and I think that’s another lesson to be learned here for writers. Most of the stories are on the longer side. I appreciated that about it. I prefer a chunkier story that justifies its real estate and these all do that, in large part because of their impact at the sentence level. Every sentence in these stories feels necessary. The trend for short fiction of late has been to go as short as possible, but this is how you write longer short stories that will get picked up by publishers: by getting the reader so absorbed and invested that they don’t even think about the story’s length. They’re just along for the ride as long as it lasts.
I was intrigued by the degree of linking across Afterparties. Each story definitely has its own self-contained arc, and I wouldn’t say there are necessarily any other big-picture arcs at work. There are some characters who pop up multiple times across the collection, though, giving the reader a chance to see them at a few different points of their timeline and from varying angles. This adds history and depth to the world, enhancing that immersion I mentioned above. It’s also a fun effect for the reader—there’s that little “easter egg” feeling when you come across a name for the second time and get the chance to flip back and piece together their timeline from the context clues. I like when a book gives you reasons to get more active with your reading, so I appreciated that aspect of the collection.
I’m always a smidge skeptical when a book wins a whole ton of awards, but Afterparties earns its hype. It’s a tragedy that Anthony Veasna So died so young—I can only imagine the kind of stories he would have told if he had more time, and this posthumous collection is definitely worth a read for anyone who enjoys sharply written literary fiction.
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