Gunk Baby

October 3, 2022
In Australian writer Lau’s imaginative if underpowered sophomore effort (after Pink Mountain on Locust Island), a young woman opens a business in a sinister shopping mall. New business owner Leen, 24, originally from Hong Kong, attempts to attract Westerners to the traditional Chinese art of ear cleaning with Lotus Fusion Studio, which she operates out of a shopping complex called Topic Heights. As Leen struggles to attract customers, she meets Jean Paul, a smarmy pharmacist who invites her to a community group advocating for better treatment of retail employees, and becomes the reluctant getaway driver (Jean Paul doesn’t have a car) for the group’s “Resisting Acts,” a series of increasingly malevolent pranks on stores in Topic Heights. Then, Leen’s roommates ask her to move out so that they can focus on their new business manufacturing synthetic human urine to help people beat drug tests, and she becomes romantically involved with Luis, the manager of a successful franchise of a large Chinese lifestyle brand. Lau makes some good points about consumerism and ably captures the mood of disenchanted youth, but the slow pacing and underdeveloped supporting characters make this feel aimless. Lau has plenty of talent, but while this starts strong, it falls apart at the end.

November 1, 2022
The second novel by young Australian writer Lau is a maximalist caper set in the most achingly existential of modern locales: a suburban shopping mall. Twenty-four-year-old Leen is adrift in her life. She and her mother settled in Par Mars, a suburb of carefully anonymizing subdivisions, when Leen was a child because they were attracted to "the tiredness of it, the bored unattractiveness of it, the lonely, antisocial nature of it, that made [them] both look inward." Both her parents have since moved on, and Leen is left crashing somewhat indefinitely in her friend Doms' living room, taking courses in massage therapy, and watching analysis videos of movies on her phone. With seed money from her peripatetic father and instruction from her mother--who has recently started a "healing business" in Hong Kong--Leen opens an ear-cleaning and massage studio in the Topic Heights shopping center, which sits in the center of the Par Mars suburb and represents "the exact summation of every need and personality of the people residing in its hem." Though both Par Mars and Topic Heights strive to create the impression of regulation, order, and predictably scaled progress, there are signs that things are starting to come loose at the seams. Vic, Doms' Nigerian boyfriend, is beaten in the street in a possibly racially motivated attack, and the rising unrest among the low-wage workers in Topic Heights is an expression of the growing social divide between people like Peggy--the CEO of the shopping complex, who facilitates drug-fueled swinger parties at her hilltop house on the coastal side of the estates--and people like Jean Paul, a nihilist pharmacy assistant who hosts social resistance meetings at the East Par Mars Community Center. As her business founders, Leen becomes increasingly involved with Jean Paul's Resistance Acts--which begin as essentially harmless pranks against Topic Heights management but quickly escalate into psychological torment and then real bodily harm--even as she starts to doubt the purity of his proletariat motives. Lau's second novel treads similar ground as Pink Mountain on Locust Island (2020), her debut take on Gen Z alienation, but with a hyperconscious maximalism that occasionally overwhelms the reader with the equity of its attention. There is so much to see in this novel that the reader is sometimes at a loss for where to look. Funny, bold, capacious, and more than a little exhausting--this book mirrors modern life.

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March 31, 2021
Leen has opened up a massage and ear cleaning studio in the suburban wastelands of Par Mars. Her shop is housed in the second-best shopping mall in the district—Topic Heights. The story is dreamlike, almost feverish from the outset. By the time we meet her, Leen is already somewhat of a passenger in her own life—she sleeps on a trundle bed in the living room of a friend who survives off lottery money. She hasn’t settled on a name for her store. So, when a somewhat repulsive yet confident acquaintance demands that she start driving him to a mysterious series of meetings, she goes along with it. Gunk Baby is author Jamie Marina Lau’s second novel and it is confident, assured and excitingly unique, exploring the idea of consumerism, of the risk of prioritising things over people, by never taking the expected stance. The story takes surreal, dark and sometimes violent turns as Leen is slowly consumed by not just the mall, but by a group that purports to be fighting against all the things the mall stands for. While the ideas are firmly drawn from the real world, Lau deftly uses the dreamy yet tense atmosphere she has created to underscore the horror of the everyday. Readers who enjoyed Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World or Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police will find much to appreciate in Gunk Baby. Elizabeth Flux is a freelance writer and editor.