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Jenny Xie, Holding Pattern, Riverhead Books, 2023. 288 pgs.

Jenny Xie’s novel Holding Pattern follows 28-year-old Kathleen Cheng as she returns home to Oakland, California, where she is roped into wedding preparations for her newly engaged mother, Marissa. Kathleen, fresh out of a break-up and an unfinished cognitive psychology dissertation on haptics and touch, finds that her mother is not the same person she was when she left. Health-obsessed, motivated, and aggressively upbeat, Marissa is a far cry from the unhappy homesick divorcee that Kathleen remembers. As Kathleen attempts to reconcile these two versions of her mother, she finds a job at a start-up called Midas Touch that specialises in professional cuddling. Soon, she is learning spooning techniques to apply on a revolving door of touch-deprived clients. Between the two narratives—one about immigration, family, and belonging, and the other about connection, loneliness, and intimacy—Xie draws out the intricate dynamics of relationships old and new, and what we seek from the people around us.

The novel is at its strongest when it gives us glimpses into the narrator’s past, creating a deeper understanding of her relationship with her parents, and the tensions that she navigates with Marissa in the present day. With each flashback, the characters take on more depth and dimension: in a casino, over borrowed roller-blades, dancing in a kitchen to Teresa Teng’s “The Moon Represents My Heart”. The tensions that Kathleen navigates with Marissa are especially poignant, and their relationship is imbued with a careful nuance and ambiguity that refrains from type-casting either mother or daughter. The mother-daughter relationship is complimented by Midas Touch: the concept of a professional cuddling service is just absurd enough to be provocative, yet plausible enough to resonate.

That said, the emotional resonance is precluded, at times, by the nature of the prose, which can feel strained and unnatural in its attempt to reach for descriptors and metaphors that don’t quite land. It also has potential for more emotional depth than it achieves: just as the narrative seems to hit its stride, we abruptly pivot to scenes with Kathleen’s high school friends (at raves, or pet-influencer conferences). While Xie depicts a wide range of relationships, some fall flatter than others, and the shallower of the connections could have feasibly been sacrificed to secure our investment in Kathleen and Marissa’s relationship. The novel concludes with a new understanding between mother and daughter; but it is only by the end that we feel most invested in their relationship. While I liked that the ending didn’t attempt for a clear-cut resolution, I would have loved to spend more time with the versions of Kathleen and Marissa we are left with at the end of the book: a mother and daughter moving slowly towards an unfamiliar intimacy, tentative yet more grounded than ever before.

How to cite: Chung, Anna. “The Science of Intimacy: Jenny Xie’s Holding Pattern.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 12 Sept. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/09/12/holding-pattern.

Anna Chung graduated from Princeton University, where she received a degree in English and Creative Writing. Her research and writing interests include memory, identity, and narrative in contemporary Asian American literature. Her work has appeared in Midstory, The Nassau Literary Review, and Princeton Alumni Weekly. [All contributions by Anna Chung.]

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