Melanie Cheng

Room for a Stranger is a contemporary fiction set in suburban Melbourne about the relationship between an elderly woman and her international student boarder. The author is a Chinese-Australian GP from Melbourne, who grew up in Hong Kong before returning to Australia to study medicine.

Meg is a lonely 75 year old who has lived alone in outer Melbourne since her sister died, with only Atticus the African grey parrot for company. Shaken up by a break-in Meg decides to rent her spare room to a student. Andy is from Hong Kong and studying Biomedical Science. He is forced to move out of Melbourne city centre as his parents can no longer afford the rent. There is a definite cultural and generational gap between Andy and Meg. Andy finds Meg’s hygiene practices repulsive, and Meg finds Andy uncommunicative and disengaged. Both have their issues: Meg her loneliness, and Andy his anxiety about his upcoming exams and his mother back in Hong Kong suffering ongoing mental health problems.

This was a quiet and pleasant read but nothing earth-shattering. Meg was nice enough, and should probably have created some quirky vibes typical of the elderly rebirth lit around now, but never really had enough zing to do so. Andy also never really connected as a character. While I must admit that in part I envy Cheng for her ability to produce a novel as a medical professional, she also seems unable to let this role go and is constantly adding small but irrelevant medical details like the reminder to Andy to rinse his mouth out after using his steroid puffer. I’m not quite sure why contemporary fiction feels the need to convey a myriad of tiny details and minutiae about everything in the characters’ environment, as if somehow that equates to good descriptive writing. Overall a relatively enjoyable but fairly dull book that I gave 3 stars to.… (mehr)

There are times when a certain ‘type’ of novel is just right for your next read. This month’s title seems to fill this description for our group. Our first face-to-face meeting in many months was a very happy occasion. COVID-19 has had us meeting remotely since April, so everyone was on a collective high as we discussed Room for a Stranger. A gentle story of ageing, companionship, racial and generational coming together.
There was a general agreement that the characters were a wonderful mix of authentic and relatable. Everyone felt that the communication gap was a large part of why Meg and Andy found their relationship stalling. As readers we were privy to both sides, this helped in large part to instil our empathy for both. Atticus the parrot was a nice touch, as was Andy’s uni friend, whose misguided help with exams gave an even clearer ring of truth to the story.
A few of us were disappointed with the conclusion to this book. A more clear-cut picture of what happened to both Meg and Andy was wanted. Either way, everyone felt that the coming together of these two very different people did, in some small way, implant something in both that would have a lasting effect.
A great little Aussie novel.… (mehr)

I've been thinking all day about how to write a review of this book. Melanie Cheng is an award-winning author, and her debut novel Room for a Stranger, has been very widely praised, but although I found it mildly enjoyable, I'm not at all sure that it merits being termed rel="nofollow" target="_top">a modern masterpiece.

Somewhere in the plethora of reviews about the book, I saw (but now can't find) something about it being an example of the 'new sincerity movement', a repudiation, it seems, of postmodernism and irony. It is certainly written in serviceable prose, with a straightforward linear plot with just occasional flashbacks, narrated by the two main protagonists, who come from cross-cultural environments but share a deep-seated loneliness.

The story is set in ordinary suburban Melbourne, about 10km from the CBD—which puts it squarely among some now very expensive real estate. Probably not Albert Park since there are cartoonish bungalows rather than elegant terraces, perhaps out west somewhere, like Coburg or Maribyrnong or Maidstone where houses sell for $800,000+. As sole inheritor of her parents' once humble estate, the central character 75-year-old Meg Hughes is almost certainly asset-rich and could downsize to a more manageable apartment, unit or townhouse and still have money left over to live a little. But she doesn't do this because she is inhibited by fear of change, she has let inertia take over her life and she is paralysed by lifelong shyness. What finally prompts her to take a young international student into her home is a visit from a prowler. Bizarrely, she thinks that taking in a complete stranger from another culture will make her feel safer. And she thinks she would like the company.

(I know that a reader has to accept the book that's been written, but I can't help thinking how interesting this book might have been if Meg had opened up her home to one of the growing numbers of homeless older women. Or the scruffy but likeable couple I met yesterday when I called in at Launch Housing with a question. Dull respectability meets Nonconformist Attitude! I think I would like somebody to write such a book).

Anyway...

Since the writing is nothing special, this kind of character-driven novel depends entirely on the reader becoming invested in these two characters, and that is the problem that I have. I think readers will judge it differently depending on their age group. Millennials and Generation X who perhaps regard anyone over 60 as elderly and past-their-use-by date may find the dawn of a May-September cross-cultural friendship authentic and heart-warming, but I think the novel paints a distorted and very melancholy picture of an older unmarried woman. Having only very recently been reading Caroline Lodge's Older Women in Literature project at the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative I am more conscious of the way older women are portrayed, and Meg Hughes as a pathetic and lonely old women doesn't fit my experience of women in her age group at all. It won't surprise anyone my age that I have more friends living alone than in coupledom: in our age cohort there are plenty of women who've never married, or are divorced or widowed. If these women have children, these adult children are often living and working far away, some of them permanently overseas. But my friends, nearly all of them older than me and some in their 80s and 90s, would be aghast at Cheng's portrait of Meg Hughes, who at only 75 gives up on life. No volunteering or pensioner travel or U3A classes or competitive croquet for her! She loves reading, but she doesn't even hang out at her library or have any virtual bookworm friends.

(BTW please don't make the mistake of thinking that all my friends are well-educated middle-class career women with comfortable superannuation funds. That's not the case at all.)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/10/19/room-for-a-stranger-by-melanie-cheng/… (mehr)