Over the past week I could feel myself slowing down, hesitating to pick back up Alvin Lu’s Daydreamers. Not because of disinterest but because I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to savor it.
At its core Daydreamers is a mystery and a fairly mundane one at that: what really happened between Rafael and Lena that ended with his death? We find out nothing. And even the faintest hint of just who Rafael and especially Lena were or are continues to recede the further we read on.
There is hardly any reason even to enjoy the almost negligible plot: a couple of people lose their jobs, a man retires, a real estate agent analyzes the market, some babies are born, a few people volunteer their time, people are stuck in traffic.
My god, you might think, this sounds like a terrible book! But the mystery and the plot points paradoxically don’t really matter much. The book really is about other more important things anyway: the mystery of reading and the sensuous and cerebral pleasures that a text can offer. In this Lu is a master.
I hate describing things that aren’t meditation as a meditation, so maybe let’s say that Daydreamers is a deliberation or contemplation on the semiotics of the everyday. How do these things which we all experience come to have meaning and significance? Why do certain artifacts and actions affect us so while others are consigned to the background? How do we decipher the commonplace? What changing role does translation play over the course of our lives? What roles do the uncanny and coincidental play in determining our identities?
Maybe the real mystery that Daydreamers attempts to grapple with: can a realist novel also be a ghost story? And not actual ghosts, but rather the ghosts that haunt our waking hours when we’re trying to make a living and do our shopping, commuting to our jobs, and raising our children.
I find the word attenuate somehow fitting for how Lu goes about this: these conceptual monoliths that burden us humans—time, meaning, identity—are attenuated, somewhat reduced in capital-I Importance so that they become very nearly white noise, barely perceptible. The sheer (in at least two senses) atmosphere through which we move daily. This is where Lu is most at home.
Or a visual metaphor: instead of Red, Blue, and Green, Lu devotes the time and energy throughout his novel to pointing out the micro-gradations of the spectrum that we just about ignore. Instead of the monumental “Who Am I,” Lu refracts identity to show how we are as much the small hopes we have for our children as the faded memories we have of a distant home. Or the rumors we try to outrun.
Maybe, just maybe, the most significant, important, and defining event is really just a dim, disappearing recollection, half-remembered and half-daydreamed, of peering into the window of a closed Chinese restaurant.
And I have to write a few words about Lu’s language and the text itself: elegant, acute, seductive, and sensitive, all while, again, writing about commercial real estate. But also again: it’s not about commercial real estate.
Readers must negotiate with the text that interweaves memories, interviews, memoirs, and novelizations. At times the various versions literally compete for the reader’s attention: which column of text should I read first? how are these texts related to one another?
Lu’s descriptions are exceptional. Whether of changes in geography, in topology, moving between northern and southern California or the atonality of contemporary music or the rundown obsolescence of both buildings and people, Lu writes with precision and care. I would gladly read his description of a phone book.