What Hunger

In Dang’s incendiary sophomore novel (after Nice Girls), a Midwestern teen grapples with grief and a generational divide with her Vietnamese immigrant parents while discovering an insatiable appetite for raw meat. As the story opens, 14-year-old Veronica “Ronny” Nguyen attends her older brother Tommy’s high school graduation, where he’s honored as valedictorian. Their parents fete him with a lavish party featuring crisp pork belly and roast duck, but as summer approaches, tension brews between the siblings and their parents (“We were American kids with Vietnamese parents. We were foreigners to them: a spectacle, an experience,” Ronny narrates). Tommy chafes under the family’s strict rules, and after a bitter argument, he stays out late and is struck by a car and killed. Distraught, Ronny’s father finds solace in alcohol; her mother falls into a deep depression and wears the same ratty, brown robe every day; and Ronny feels adrift (“I felt nothing. No nerves, no excitement, no dread”). That fall, she sneaks out to attend a house party with older kids, where she’s sexually assaulted and escapes her attacker by biting his ear off, which energizes her. She finds that raw meat quells her melancholy and rage, and takes to eating raw steak from the butcher shop as she fantasizes about killing and eating her assailant. Dang keenly captures her narrator’s alienation and anger, and the intergenerational tale concludes with a powerful revelation about the parents’ unspoken trauma from the Vietnam War. This one hits hard. Agent: Eve Atterman, WME. (Aug.)