"Bitter in the Mouth"

I was mesmerized by Monique Truong's "The Book of Salt" when it came out in 2003. That novel about the Vietnamese cook for writer Gertrude Stein and her lesbian companion Alice B. Toklas was beautifully written. So I was excited when I saw that Truong had published a new novel, "Bitter in the Mouth" (Random House, 2010). This novel is also narrated by, and focuses on, a Vietnamese character, but in this case it is a young woman, Linda, who is adopted at age seven by a couple in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. She grows up in this small Southern town family with the usual -- and some not so usual -- dysfunctions. One of the themes of the book is the importance of family, even unusual families. Her closest family members are her adoptive father, who dies early, and her gay transvestite great uncle, Baby Harper, who is everything to her. By the end of the novel, we find out more about the complicated tangled relationships of her family and of her birth parents. The other main plot strand is Linda's synesthesia; the variety of the syndrome that she has causes words to have tastes. She only tells a very few trusted people about this, and only toward the end of the novel does she realize that she is not the only one with this unusual situation, and that it has a name. The author represents these associations as follows: "What'sgrahamcracker so funnycucumber, Leoparsnip?" Although the author is thereby making us experience Linda's world, I must admit that this got tiresome after awhile. "Bitter in the Mouth" is a rich, original, intriguing novel, and I am glad I read it, but it doesn't quite measure up to "The Book of Salt."