This Charles Yu is, quite frankly, a total mess: nerdy, needy, neurotic, and pathetically awkward around women. This Charles Yu is not the least bit normal. He goes by a variety of names, one of which is Charles Yu. His friends call him Charlie, a name that seems to suit him to the ground.īut there's another Charles Yu, the young male protagonist of Charles Yu's often very unsettling fiction, including his new collection of meta-science fiction short stories, Sorry Please Thank You, published this month by Pantheon Books. He has no discernible accent, no obvious personality quirks, no vocal mannerisms or facial tics or signature gestures of any kind.
When he smiles, which is often, his teeth are very white and very straight, though not disconcertingly so. At a young-looking thirty-six, he's handsome, though not disconcertingly so if he were an actor, like his brother, Kelvin, he would play not the romantic lead but rather the romantic lead's best friend, his sidekick and wingman, loyal to a fault. Their condo in Santa Monica, California-where he has a perfectly normal nine-to-five job as a lawyer at a visual-effects company-is comfortable but unpretentious, strewn with the kids' toys. Not that he's available: He's happily married to a beautiful woman named Michelle, and the doting dad of two beautiful young children. He's superpolite, superfriendly, superhelpful in an upstanding Boy Scout sort of way-the kind of young man any elderly lady would be thrilled to have help her across the street, and also the kind any young woman would be ecstatic to take home to meet her parents. BY ALL APPEARANCES, Charles Yu is the most normal guy on the planet.
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