New review of Charles Yu’s Third Class Superhero at INDenverTimes.
Each of Yu’s meticulously crafted stories is an experiment in form, expanding in different ways on the themes of fragmented identity and alienation. Problems for Self-Study unfolds as a math problem involving a train moving at a constant speed and a lonely character named A who is departing town to find someone who shares his love of mathematical theory. In My Last Days as Me the actor playing Me in the television show “Me and My Mother” finds his role as Me uncomfortably altered by the recasting of his mother.Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction is the story of a man’s failed attempt to construct a coherent biography for his mother. Then there is the first sentence of The Man Who Became Himself, the sublime: “He was turning into something unspeakable.”
