KING OF THE ARMADILLOS, by Wendy Chin-Tanner
When Hans Castorp arrives at the tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos-Platz, Switzerland, in “The Magic Mountain” — Thomas Mann’s monumental meditation on the metamorphosing process of illness, the mutability of time and the feast of death that is the human body — he thinks he’s there for a three-week visit. His short stay transforms into a seven-year passage through all the stages of the human tragicomedy.
Fifteen-year-old Victor Chin, the lovable and simple-hearted protagonist of Wendy Chin-Tanner’s lambent and poignant debut, “King of the Armadillos,” is in a very similar position. Victor is an immigrant to the United States and lives in the Bronx with his cavalier father, Sam; Sam’s lover and Victor’s surrogate mother-figure, Ruth; and an angry and combative older brother, Henry. At the start of the novel, he is diagnosed with Hansen’s disease, commonly known at the time as leprosy. The novel is set in the booming 1950s, but the stigma of the disease, no different in the 20th century than in the New Testament, could mean ruin for his family. If people were to find out that Victor had the disease, Sam could lose his laundry business and Victor could become a pariah.
Fortunately, doctors tell Victor and his family that there is a quick cure available through a free government treatment at the Carville National Leprosarium in Louisiana. Henry, with a cleareyed perspective of the United States’ shortcomings, is adamant about not shipping his little brother off to some government facility where those responsible for the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese internment camps will surely run secret and inhumane experiments on the new Asian kid. However, the doctors say that at the center, Victor will have a nerve transplant operation on his arm, receive medical treatment and soon return to New York good as new. With the promise of an easy remedy, Sam and Ruth decide to send Victor away, while Victor’s biological mother, who is still in China, is kept in the dark about the whole situation.
But Victor’s stay at Carville becomes much more than a medical drive-by. Once there, he is forced for the first time to be on his own and to come to terms with parts of himself, his family’s past and his adopted country’s deformities — things that he would have never confronted without the spur of his illness.
Chin-Tanner portrays the soul-withering routines of institutionalization and the bonding of the damned with elegiac strokes during Victor’s passage through the purgatory that is Carville. Victor falls in love with a fellow patient, Judy, who does not return his affections, but his romantic feelings do not quite merit the heights of lyricism or the possibility of transcendence offered by his other newly discovered passion: the piano. Having learned to play as therapy to regain full use of his hands, he discovers the world anew through music, basking in “the trilling calls and answers of the birds, the patter of the rain, the turning of the bicycle wheel.” He finds an admirer in an older patient, Herb, who introduces him to the lusty improvisations of Monk and Mingus. “This is why America is great,” Herb says. With music, the grace — of completeness, of belonging, of purpose — that has eluded Victor and his broken family is for the first time accessible.
In the last third, the narrative becomes somewhat schematic and too concerned with setting up a conclusion through the major events at home in the Bronx, including the arrival of Victor’s mother from China. The more gripping and tenderly executed drama, however, remains internal for Victor. The wonder of the novel is that he holds on to his resonant and unassuming optimism throughout, despite the challenges he faces and even as the narrative allows for darker interpretations of Victor’s fate. The jury will still be out on Victor’s optimism regarding the fate of the American other — the sick, the “alien,” the unacknowledged — long after readers close this novel.
Ernesto Mestre-Reed’s most recent novel is “Sacrificio.”
KING OF THE ARMADILLOS | By Wendy Chin-Tanner | 322 pp. | Flatiron Books | $28.99