Can a Marriage Survive a Summer Holiday With the In-Laws?

RENTAL HOUSE, by Weike Wang

“Every happy family is unhappy in its own way” — is that the quote? Or maybe it’s, “Every unhappy family is happy to stay that way,” or even, “You only learn the ways in which a family is unhappy when they come to stay.” With or without Tolstoy’s wisdom, most couples know that extended visits from their in-laws reveal new edges to old dynamics between parents and children. Over the course of a friendly visit, tried-and-true ways of keeping the peace fail to function and new ways struggle to be born. It’s in this strange clash of familiarity and friction that Weike Wang’s third novel, “Rental House,” makes its home.

Keru and Nate are young married professionals living in New York City with high-pressure jobs and a sheepdog. Keru, a corporate consultant, is the child of strict, highly driven Chinese immigrants who became United States citizens when she was young and instilled in her “the belief that to live was to struggle, and that to struggle was a given, yet one need not know why.” Nate, a biology professor, is the first in his white, working-class family to go to college, and carries with him a sense of isolation born of climbing into the elite ranks of tenure-track academia. Their marriage is a merging of two cultural backgrounds into a functioning unit, oriented around their shared social status (even their dog’s name, Mantou, the Chinese word for a tasty steamed bun, accords with what Nate calls “the propensity of yuppie couples to name their expensive dogs after basic starch items”). But four encounters across the novel’s two halves expose serious fissures in their relationship that have gone unperceived, and therefore unaddressed.

In the first half, the couple drive out to a New England cottage they’ve rented for a month in the summer, where they will host each of their families in succession. First Keru’s mother and father arrive, armed with Mace and carrying coolers full of homemade food, afraid in the year since the onset of the pandemic to eat out or be unmasked around anyone outside their immediate family unit. When Keru’s parents leave, Nate’s show up: cheery Midwesterners whose goals are to see every lighthouse and eat every oyster in the area, while worrying out loud about whether Nate is doing enough to stay in touch with his prodigal brother, Ethan — an aspiring entrepreneur but frequent washout — and whether Nate is assimilating himself too much within the culture and values of his Chinese wife.

The book’s second half takes place on another vacation several years later, after illness strikes both sets of parents and the progress of Nate’s and Keru’s careers means they’re spending more and more time apart. In a lakeside bungalow two hours north of the city where the couple have gone to unwind, a meeting with their neighbors, a well-off Romanian family visiting from Brooklyn, turns sour; and then Ethan shows up to ask Nate to fund an ill-conceived business venture.