Life After God with a Twist
Hwee Hwee Tan's Foreign Bodies
Andy Crouch
January 1, 1999
Foreign Bodies, by Hwee Hwee Tan (Persea Books, 1999), 279 pp.
On the first page of Foreign Bodies, we are served notice that we are reading Gen X fiction by the throwaway reference to a Casio alarm clock, the identification of the central character as a newly minted law-school grad, and the nonchalant juxtaposition of Mother Teresa's name with a vulgar scatological term having to do with simian waste. On the last page, we find a gripping, fully believable exposition of Christian hope that leaves the heart pounding and shoulders shaking.
In between these pages is an astonishing first novel that can best be described as a cross between Douglas Coupland and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Coupland, Hwee Hwee Tan, a 25-year-old native of Singapore who studied at Oxford and now resides in New York City, has an uncanny ear for the voice of the emerging generation—knowing, dark, always slightly skew to the world. But she also has the courage, and the raw talent, to transcend the increasingly tired conventions of Gen X literature. Her characters do wander through life unsure of their destination and somewhat cynical about the journey—but unlike the denizens of Coupland's dreary landscape, their meanderings are unexpectedly interrupted.
Foreign Bodies is an ensemble piece, narrated alternately by Mei, Andy, and Eugene, three friends living in Singapore whose lives first crossed while studying at Oxford. The novel begins as Mei receives a desperate phone call—Andy, a British citizen, has just been arrested by the Singaporean police for running a multi-national football (i.e., soccer) betting ring. The charges are false, we are quickly persuaded, because Andy, a clever but dissipated youth, doesn't have the self-discipline to mastermind ...
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