BITTER IN THE MOUTH

After the dazzle of her debut (The Book of Salt, 2003), Truong returns with a coming-of-age narrative about a young girl who has always felt like an outsider in her small North Carolina town, not to mention within her own family.

Narrator Linda, born in 1968, hears words as tastes. There is no obvious logic—“Mother” becomes chocolatemilk, “tomorrow” becomes breakfastsausage—but the result makes for lovely juxtapositions. Adored by her lawyer father Thomas and her uncle Baby Harper, a librarian, Linda senses she is merely tolerated by her mother DeAnne. At seven, Linda begins what becomes a lifelong written snail-mail correspondence with best friend Kelly. After 11-year-old Linda is raped by the teenager who mows the family’s lawn, she blames her mother for neither noticing nor protecting her. The rape interferes with Linda’s budding romance with sensitive Wade, the object of Kelly’s affection as well. In high school, previously overweight but precocious Kelly thins and dumbs down to join the popular crowd until she gets pregnant (father unnamed but obvious) and must leave town her senior year. Tomboyish Linda takes the school-valedictorian route, smoking cigarettes to block taste “incomings” that make academic concentration difficult. After her father’s death when she is 17, Linda leaves for Yale. Flash forward to 1998. Now a lawyer whose fiancé leaves her when cancer makes childbearing impossible, Linda discovers she has an actual neurological condition called synesthesia, which causes “involuntary mixing of the senses.” She also finally acknowledges what readers have long suspected: by birth Linda is Vietnamese; she was adopted after her birth father and mother, whom Thomas had loved while in law school, if not more recently, died in a fire. As Linda learns about her secret history as well as her Uncle’s sexual secrets and DeAnne’s private heartache, she and DeAnne grow closer and learn to forgive, perhaps even love, one another.

Truong remains a stunning wordsmith and a whiz at intellectual showmanship, but Linda’s story tastes of artificial plot manipulation.