Born in Hong Kong in 1975, Chong grew up in Vancouver, graduated from UBC's Creative Writing program and received an MFA at Columbia University in New York City. His first novel Baroque-a-Nova is a coming-of-age story described by the publisher as a 'bitingly humorous take on the music business'. On the Monday he gets the boot from school for protesting a book ban, Saul St. Pierre, 18, learns his folksinger Mom, who abandoned him in his infancy, has committed suicide in Thailand. While coping with the influx of publicity resulting from his famous mother's death and the revival of her music due to a cover version by a German post-punk band, the protagonist leads a student walk-out in defence of a banned book that he has never read. "The intention was street theatre, a counter spectacle. Underneath the overcast sky, on the bleachers before the soccer field, sat Hedda, wearing a tiara made of aluminum foil, a huge, costume-issue ruby necklace, and a strapless ball gown, maroon and crushed velvet, with a sash across it reading, 'Miss Police State 1998'. She held at her side a bullhorn, which she handed over to Navi, who proceeded to direct the thirty-five members of Rent-a-Mob in the middle of the field... There were two or three men in dog collars, two women with neon-blue hair, a man wearing a rubber Pierre Trudeau mask, a woman with a "Take It Sleazy" t-shirt. They held signs carrying abusive slogans, some with no apparent political content like "Eat My Ass."...These days, to assert your presence in the world, you needed, really big signs." The novel shares its name with a jukebox in Helen's Grill, a greasy spoon on Main Street.

Chong's second book, Neil Young Nation (Greystone, 2005), is about the importance of Neil Young and his music in Chong's life. "This is strange but true," he writes, "everything I know about being young I learned from Neil Young, a jowly man approximately twice my age and now hurtling toward senior citizenship."

Chong's third book, Beauty Plus Pity (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011), is about Malcolm Kwan, a twenty-something Vancouverite struggling to become a model. Upon his father's death and his fiancee's desertion, he discovers that at some point his father had an affair, resulting in his teenaged half-sister, Hadley. As he embarks on discovering more about his father's love child, he develops a friendship that proves to be exactly what he needed.

Kevin Chong's My Year of the Racehorse: Falling in Love with the Sport of Kings (Greystone 2012) was featured on the cover of B.C. BookWorld. [See below]

A follow-up book on horse racing, Northern Dancer (Viking 2014) requires no subtitle. The Canadian thoroughbred horse that won two of the Triple Crown races in 1964, as well as Canada's Queen's Plate, has become the most influential stallion in the sport of kings. An estimated seventy percent of thoroughbreds alive today are his descendants. For example, sixteen of the seventeen horses in the Queen's Plate in 2011 were Northern Dancer's grandchildren. Eighteen of the nineteen horses in the 2011 Kentucky Derby were his descendants. To mark the 50th anniversary of Northern Dancer's win at the Kentucky Derby, Chong was hired to provide a novelistic retelling of how Northern Dancer won the hearts of most Canadians in 1964.

***
The Plague by Kevin Chong (Arsenal Pulp $19.95)
Review by Joan Givner

In 1947, Albert Camus published La Peste (The Plague), sometimes called his "resistance novel." Set in the Algerian coastal city of Oran, it channelled his experiences during the German occupation of France into a fiction about a community in the grip of a deadly epidemic.

Seven decades later, Kevin Chong pays homage to Camus in The Plague by replicating the dramatic structure and some of his characters in a novel that takes place in "Vancouver, Canada in the near future."

Like the earlier work, Chong's new novel starts with the appearance of a few dead rats. Their number rapidly increases, and before long the deadly bacillus bacteria spreads to the human population.

A brief period of calm follows as civic officials issue false reassurances until the extent of the danger can no longer be concealed. A quarantine is then imposed with road blocks set up on all highways and bridges, trapping everyone within the immediate metropolitan area.

This epidemic lasts for four months and kills over 1,400 people.
Chong's novel follows three main characters-Bernard Rieux, a doctor; Raymond Siddhu, a journalist who is prevented from returning to his wife and small sons in the suburbs; and Megan Tso, an expert on funerary rites from Los Angeles, stranded during a tour to promote her book, The Meaning of Death. As their lives become entwined, a cast of minor characters includes their families and friends, as well as the city's mayor, a smooth-talking, telegenic, former Rhodes scholar.

It's up to the reader to decide the extent to which Chong is intending to draw direct parallels to world class Vancouver.

Everyone marooned by the disease is completely changed. One group forms a bond to relieve the suffering of their neighbours. Others devote their energies to escape plans, or devise ways to profit from the situation by smuggling people out and scarce commodities in.

The mayor, whose polished exterior has been demolished by the exposure of his scandalous past, is one of the few who is redeemed by his first-hand exposure to suffering.

Chong's novel is a compelling work of storytelling, which stands on its own feet, quite independent of Camus' work. At the same time, a familiarity with the source adds another dimension of complexity. Despite a long history of literary borrowing, this practice is not universally appreciated.
While a novel about a character in a classic work by Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, or Henry James is treated respectfully, the extensive use of structure and plot is suspect. When Graham Swift's Last Orders won The Booker Prize, he was accused of plagiarizing Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Earlier this year a New Yorker story that replicated Mavis Gallant's story The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street caused a flurry of angry letters.
Jane Austen seems to be the current favourite for clumsy riffs. Of course, much depends on whether the execution of the second text is skillful or weak. As T.S. Eliot noted, a good writer improves or at least makes different what he borrows.

Chong's novel illustrates the innovative use of a classic text at its best. One of the striking features of Camus' novel is the distinctive voice of his narrator: a conscientious witness of a great tragedy, striving for reportorial objectivity but often ironic. Chong echoes the tone; his narrator becoming at times admonitory as he cautions, "Don't misinterpret [the characters] as archetypes."

On another occasion, he provides a mock trigger-warning to those who might be traumatized by the harrowing description of a child's gruesome death: "We therefore kindly invite those who might feel most sensitively about this material to either skip the remainder of this chapter or read it at arm's length."

Camus' trademark sense of the absurd is evident in his description of a municipal clerk who is an aspiring writer, unskilled but obsessive. As tragic and heroic events unfold around him, he endlessly polishes the first sentence of a novel set in an exotic place he has never seen. Chong, likewise, has a would-be author who gets no further than the endless revision of an opening sentence.

Chong provides a new perspective on Camus' characters and incidents by transposing them into a different context. Sometimes similar details spark totally divergent situations, as do the following notes pinned to an apartment door.

Camus' character named Cottard: "Come in, I've hanged myself."
Chong's character named Farhad Khan: "I have killed myself. Call the police. You do not need to see this."

Both these two aforementioned characters find a nefarious purpose during a time of universal devastation. When normalcy returns and deprives them of their new-found purpose, they become deranged and violent. Yet these two, fully-realized characters have little personal resemblance to each other. Coming from different ethnic backgrounds, they have individual histories and their own eccentricities and speech patterns. It's just one example of how Chong's novel manages to be similar but also different.

Whereas Camus pays little attention to the Arab population of his city, or to the dispossessed, Chong is sensitive to issues of ethnic and gender diversity, extending his cast of characters to include more women.

At the same time, he casts a sharp critical and/or satirical eye on foibles of his own time such as the tourist industry promoted by the Chamber of Commerce and the by-now de rigueur author book tour.

Chong's novel shows that for all the long and checkered history of literary borrowing, it can still lead to a rediscovery of the original text, as well as yielding an independent work that is fresh and compelling.

The total effect of all these parallels and divergences is to set up a kind of dialogue between the two novels. Since Chong is writing in a later age, his variations act as a two-way critique of then and now. For instance, while both novels are set in colonized places, Chong's greater awareness of this fact is made clear in his opening, possibly tongue-in-cheek, sentence:
"The remarkable events described in this narrative took place in Vancouver (traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations) in 201..." 978-1551527185

Joan Givner, now based in Victoria, has continually provided first-rate reviews for longer than we can remember.
***

It has been five years since Kevin Chong wrote his last novel, The Plague (Arsenal Pulp, 2018) inspired by Albert Camus’ classic of the same title. In The Double Life of Benson Yu (Atria Books $27), the narrator of the story, Benson Yu, is trying to write a story set in 1980s Chinatown about a twelve-year-old boy, Bennie, living with his grandmother. Bennie gets taken in by an eccentric neighbour named Constantine when his grandmother is suddenly hospitalized. But Yu, a bestselling comic book creator can’t help interjecting himself into Bennie’s story from the present day. Things get dark as Yu reveals his own past demons.

BOOKS:

Baroque-a-Nova (Penguin, 2001; US: Putnam, 2002) 9780141000251

Neil Young Nation (Greystone, 2005) 9781553651161

Beauty Plus Pity (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011) $17.95 9781551524160

My Year of the Racehorse: Falling in Love with the Sport of Kings (Greystone, 2012) $22.95 9781553655206

Northern Dancer: The Legendary Horse that Inspired a Nation (Viking, 2014) $30 9780670067794

The Plague (Arsenal Pulp, 2018) $19.95 9781551527185

The Double Life of Benson Yu: A Novel (Atria Books, 2023) $27 9781668005491

[BCBW 2023]