Pink Mountain on Locust Island

July 27, 2020
In Australian writer Lau’s perceptive debut, an angsty teen misunderstands the actions and intentions of those around her. Monk, 15, lives with her volatile father in the Chinatown of an unnamed city, where “the gutters bulge with sesame oil” and her father’s “voice swells, fattening the timber.” After she starts hanging out with Santa Coy, a moody 19-year-old aspiring artist, Monk’s father, a former art teacher, begins showing Santa Coy’s art to his former colleagues. Monk feels excluded from the bond between the two as they achieve sudden financial success, and grows tired of cleaning up Santa Coy’s messy painting studio. She asks a friend’s mother, Honey, for some voodoo tips, hoping to cast a spell on them (“I’ll tell them, you’re not the kings of the world, you know?”). When Monk’s father is badly beaten by strangers, Monk assumes it is mystical retribution and goes back to Honey, who instructs her to set a woman’s house on fire. Instead, Monk discovers there’s more than paintings behind her father and Santa Coy’s newfound wealth. The immediacy of the terse, somewhat choppy style amplifies Monk’s confusion and emotional turmoil. This inventive work satisfies in its blending of teenage ennui and a fragmented noir aesthetic.

July 15, 2020
In this hallucinatory, impressionistic novel by a 23-year-old Australian writer, a girl's involvement with an artist opens up a world preoccupied by money and drugs. Fifteen-year-old Monk lives in a dingy Chinatown apartment with her dad, a lapsed art professor who, after Monk's mother left him, spends most of his time on their brown couch watching nature documentaries and nursing a dependency on alcohol and anxiety medication: "Xanax as a white hunk. Dad takes his with Earl Grey tea. Little yellow sappy sags for eyes." Monk meets a high school senior named Santa Coy and quickly becomes obsessed with him, but once she starts inviting him to her apartment, Santa Coy begins making "Basquiat-lite" art in the kitchen for her father. The two men host exhibitions of Santa Coy's work in the apartment, attend art shows, and start having muttered discussions about paint and profit. Monk begins to feel left out, though it's unclear whether she wants Santa Coy's or her father's attention all to herself, to make art herself, to have art made of her--or all of the above. Santa Coy and Monk's father suddenly come into a lot of money, and Monk's father is just as suddenly attacked and ends up in the hospital. Perhaps, Monk thinks, it's because she asked her friend's mother, a "healer" named Honey, to help her with her situation, which only draws her further into an underworld suffused with scammers and violence. The novel is told in a series of titled, hyperassociative, impressively strange vignettes. The entirety of "This Generation Asks for Signs," for instance: "Do you think in Heaven everybody will be the same amount of appealing, and never stop? In the mirror my body's becoming a tree." Lau narrates the drug-laced high school parties and booze-drenched art world parties Monk moves through with the same ambiently threatening mood--selling "fake art" and selling "fake drugs," it's clear, are much the same thing. The prose is laden with significance, repeated references to jazz and cowboys and panthers and deserts that can get so dense it's unclear, in the end, what it's all supposed to mean. Hypnotizing and inscrutable.

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February 22, 2018
Set in a Chinatown in an unnamed city, Jamie Marina Lau’s first book is a neon sucker-punch of a coming-of-age story. A short, literary novel in the vein of Jenny Offill and Diane Williams, its episodic chapters—some as brief as one sentence, some a few pages long—tell the story of 15-year-old Monk, who lives with her father in a small Chinatown apartment. When Monk brings home 19-year-old artist Santa Coy after meeting him in an internet café, her father pins his failed artistic dreams on the interloper. But as her father takes Santa Coy under his wing, Monk feels increasingly neglected, and begins to act accordingly. Monk’s naiveté, combined with her father’s neglect, leads her to trouble, and it all comes to a head in a gripping finale. Lau’s surreal prose captures the confusion of adolescence in the 21st century. Vivid, inventive descriptions of yum cha, high-school friendships and claustrophobic apartment living evoke the experience of growing up in a diasporic community and the sensory overload of being surrounded by people, yet still alone. A stylish yet moving glimpse into the loneliness of being a teenage girl, Pink Mountain on Locust Island heralds the arrival of an electric new Australian writer. Kelsey Oldham is a bookseller at Readings and deputy editor of Swampland magazine