Deplorable Conversations With Cats And Other Distractions
By Yeoh Jo-Ann
Fiction/Penguin Random House South-east Asia/Paperback/383 pages/$29.32/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3UjnwKN)
3 stars
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book with “cat” in the title must be catnip for the bestseller charts.
Witness the phenomenon of The Travelling Cat Chronicles (2012) by Hiro Arikawa, or other Straits Times bestsellers such as The Cat Who Saved Books (2017) by Sosuke Natsukawa and the Singapore-set The Community Cat Chronicles (2020) by Lachlan Madsen and Eleanor Nilsson.
The latest feline fiction to claw its way to the top of the charts is Deplorable Conversations With Cats And Other Distractions, the second novel of Malaysia-born, Singapore-based Yeoh Jo-Ann.
It possesses a bevy of tropes to gladden the heart of any millennial hipster. Artisanal coffee? Check. Heritage shophouse in a gentrifying neighbourhood? Check. Cats? Check, check and check.
Unfortunately, none of this coheres in an aimless narrative that grasps at, yet falls short of, the wit and whimsy that infused Yeoh’s Epigram Books Prize-winning debut, Impractical Uses Of Cake (2019).
Her hero this time is Lucky Lee, a coffee magnate’s son who seems to have a charmed life despite not being much use in any respect.
The handsome 39-year-old lives rent-free in his architectural marvel of a family home and co-owns Caffiend, an independent cafe located in his late father’s Joo Chiat shophouse.
Sure, his parents are dead, he never made it as an architect and his domineering sister Pearl, a celebrity television chef, keeps him under her thumb.
Otherwise, however, he is breezing through life – that is, until Pearl dies in a plane crash and her cat Coconut starts talking to a grieving Lucky, who wonders if he is losing his mind.
This mid-life crisis novel meanders through the long, interminable process of grief, as Lucky mourns his sister in ways his friends find questionable and takes Coconut on a quixotic odyssey to Malaysia in search of a mysterious house his father left behind.
The tale is peppered with bursts of trivia. If you have ever wanted to know more about coffee beans sourced from South-east Asia or Art Deco architecture in the tropics, you are in luck.
Yet, like its absent-minded protagonist, it never manages to focus on anything for very long.
There are many intriguing characters, such as Mit, Lucky’s Punjabi ex-girlfriend whom Coconut reveals Pearl was shockingly racist about, an issue which is never really unpacked. But they pop up as brief tangents, then slide out of view like billboards on an expressway.
Lucky’s “poor little rich boy” shtick begins to grate before long. His friends, his relations and Pearl constantly badger him to do something useful with his numerous privileges and the reader is more likely to share their exasperation than sympathise with him.
Yeoh’s skill with words is evident, the coffee is well-researched and the cats are cute. The novel, however, could do with fewer distractions.
If you like this, read: Impractical Uses Of Cake (Epigram Books, 2019, $26.90, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/4aCkBlY). In Yeoh’s debut novel, Sukhin, a 35-year-old teacher, has his orderly life upended when he meets an old flame, Jinn, who is now homeless.
