UNCANNY VALLEY

Mannequins and mystification in Dorothy Tse’s dreamlike Hong Kong.

- KATY WALDMAN

Opposites converge and hierarchies are upended in Tse’s début novel.

“The professor had his arms around Aliss’s waist, and imagined him self a prince from a fairy tale.” Already, the reader is peeking anxiously through her fingers. Abort! Abort! Literature is littered with the bodies of would-be lovers who gallop off the edge of reality. Don Quixote, the ur-fantasist, “spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset,” until “his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind.” Two centuries later, Emma Bovary died of overexposure to romances, having fancied herself “the beloved of every novel, the heroine of every drama, the vague she of every volume of poetry.” And now, in “Owlish,” a new work of fiction by Dorothy Tse, a lonely middle-aged professor named Q falls in love with Aliss, a life-size mechanical ballerina. He forgets that his princess is just a toy and that he is just a “hack teacher.” In thrall to an inanimate object, he feels freer than he ever has.