Interior Chinatown

I have a new favorite book this year and I'm pretty sure it's cresting into my top 10 books of all time: INTERIOR CHINATOWN by Charles Yu. 
 
The storytelling in INTERIOR CHINATOWN is commanding. I had no idea TV scripts - the scripts themselves, not the acting bringing the scripts to life - could be so arresting. 
 
It's difficult to explain what this book is because it's so many things. It's an exploration of Asian American masculinity interlaced with the model minority myth – all told from the perspective of our protagonist, Willis Wu. It's also a glimpse behind the scenes at pop culture and Hollywood tropes. This book challenges you to center neither white nor Black, but the unique experiences of marginalized people who don't fit into the racial binary. Ugh this is all coming out clunkily - I'm a reader, not a writer - but it's very meta while still being character-driven. 
 
If you're like me, at some points in this book you might be confused. “Are we in the script, or are we out? Are all these people who live in the Chinatown SRO actually actors, or are we in the show when we're not in the show?” Around the 50 page mark, “have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” kept popping into my head. (It's a Westworld quote.) For good reason, I found out; Yu is also an award-winning story editor and writer on Westworld. Stick with it. He makes biting and incisive social commentary that is also really funny. Yu delves into what it means to be a trope in the real world, and what it's like when society has already made up its mind about you.