Maggie Su's Blob: A Love Story is a funny and pathos-ridden tale of social awkwardness and self-realization; a modern, delayed coming-of-age. Su's narrative voice is perfectly pitched for her inelegant but deeply sympathetic protagonist.
Vi is a 24-year-old townie and college dropout in a midwestern college town. She works a hotel chain's front desk next to a too-perfect perky blonde named Rachel. Vi is still suffering from a breakup eight months ago, barely slogging through her days. Her Taiwanese father and white mother are well-meaning and supportive, but they have trouble connecting with Vi, who has always been a loner; her older brother can be a pain, but he cares, even when Vi struggles to. Then, on a night she ventures out for the rare social occasion, she stumbles upon something new in the alley behind a bar during a drag show: a shapeless blob with a mouth and two eyes. She carries it home and, under Vi's yearning influence, it grows.
The evolving blob, which Vi will come to call Bob (it starts as a malapropism), is the only fantastical detail in a story otherwise rooted in a very familiar world, featuring the casual racism of Vi's hometown and her awkwardness with social situations. Bob takes in lots of television (and Fruity Pebbles), and after examining the pictures Vi shows him of movie stars like young Hugh Grant and Ryan Gosling, fashions himself into a tall, stunningly handsome white man with a six-pack. Vi presents him as a hookup or boyfriend; the world has trouble assimilating their match. The pairing is, in fact, a strain. "For a while, he seemed happy enough to eat and breathe and exist--the perfect companion. I should've anticipated that molding him into a man would trigger something deeper, some sort of existential awakening. Now he's just like everyone else. He has needs and desires beyond me.... He could leave without me ever knowing why." The fear of being left, of course, is key to Vi's difficulties in navigating the world.
What makes Blob special is its mix of heartrending conflict and silly, self-aware humor. Truly cringy scenes balance sweet ones. Rachel performs off and on as a friend--but Vi scarcely knows how to care for her own problems, let alone anyone else's, and her past attempts at friendship have often ended in unintended cruelty. Su excels with characters who can be significantly flawed but stir the reader's empathy. Even Bob, despite beginning his life as a blob, has a surprising amount of personality. In the end, discomfiting though it may be, Blob makes incisive observations about life for a 20-something trying to make it on her own. Blobs and humans alike may yet find home. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: This quirky, funny, pained novel considers the challenge, for any of us, of becoming fully human.