As our lives become more automated, more niche jobs are emerging to fill the gaps. In our society, people hire celebrities to shoot birthday videos or pay “job exit agents” in the hopes that the exit will be smoother. What would it be like to be that stranger who gets hired and takes on the role you’re paid by the hour for?
Kat Tang’s debut novel, Five-Star Stranger, follows a man through a months-long downward spiral when he realizes he’s becoming attached to his clients – a violation of his number one rule as a stranger in a rented apartment. This forces him to confront his past and question why he got into this business in the first place.
Tang never reveals the stranger’s real name – one of the many ways he becomes a blank slate onto which others can project whatever they want. He describes himself as an attractive man whose Japanese-American heritage allows him to easily transition between white and Asian depending on his clients’ needs. His apartment is filled with wigs and outfits for different personalities and occasions, and he can make himself look older or less old with makeup.
People also read…
If that doesn’t give you an identity crisis, he can also learn accents, mannerisms and stories from clients that he can pull out later on another gig. His evening client just wants to hear stories for an hour – so he repeats the stories his afternoon client told him over and over, even taking on the voice of the original narrator.
The juxtaposition shows how an insidious isolation has crept into our hyper-connected psyches, and how loneliness might have been truly and costlessly eliminated if only they had met the right person—or anyone, for that matter.
But why risk rejection when you can hire someone instead? The Stranger notes that “like everything else in this hyper-connected yet deeply lonely life, there was an app for that, too.”
The narrative often slips into the philosophical before returning to the safety of the light-hearted and comical; a whiplash between profound questioning of society and the humorous distraction of the stranger, so as not to get too lost in it.
Tang makes it easy to get invested in the characters. Even the brief encounters are made interesting by the psychoanalytic lens through which the stranger views them. It’s a smart book, and it has to be, to handle such a subject in a thoughtful and thought-provoking way without digging yourself into an existential hole.
“Five-Star Stranger” starts out happy, hopeful and funny. It ends up being a confused, dark mess that strangely still inspires hope. The protagonist is drained, but not empty.
With its cool premise, great descriptions, and amazing attention to emotion and relationships, Five-Star Stranger is a strong debut and Tang is an author to keep an eye on.
