Book Review: What’s it like to be a rental stranger? Kat Tang’s debut novel imagines an answer

As our lives become more automated, increasingly niche jobs materialize to fill in the gaps. Ours is a society in which people hire celebrities to make birthday videos, or pay “job leaving agents” in hopes of a more frictionless quitting experience. What would it be like to be that stranger for hire, to inhabit whatever role someone paid you by the hour to be?

Kat Tang’s debut novel, “Five-Star Stranger,” follows one man over a months-long spiral as he realizes he’s getting attached to his clients — a violation of his first rule for himself as a rental stranger — forcing him to confront his past and examine why he got into the business in the first place.

Tang never reveals the Stranger’s real name — one of the many ways he becomes a blank slate onto which others can project what they want. He’s a self-described attractive man, whose Japanese American heritage means he can code-switch easily between white and Asian depending on his clients’ needs. His apartment is full of wigs and outfits for different personalities and occasions, and he can use makeup to age himself up or down.

If this isn’t giving you identity crisis vibes yet, he also takes accents, mannerisms and stories from clients that he can later whip out for another gig. His evening client just wants to hear stories for an hour — so he regurgitates the stories his afternoon client told him nonstop, even adopting the original teller’s voice.

The juxtaposition shows how an insidious isolation has crept into our hyperconnected psyche, and how loneliness might have been solved genuinely and for free had they just met the right kind of person — or anyone at all.

But why risk rejection when you can hire someone instead? The Stranger notes that, “like everything else in this intensely connected yet deeply lonely life, there was an app for that.”

The narration often dips into philosophical before yanking back to the safety of light-hearted and funny; a whiplash between deep interrogations of society and the Stranger’s humorous deflection to avoid getting too lost in it.

Tang makes it easy to become engrossed in the characters. Even the brief encounters are made interesting by the psychoanalytical lens the Stranger sees them through. It’s a smart book, and it has to be to tackle such a topic in a thoughtful and thought-provoking way without digging itself into an existential hole.

“Five-Star Stranger” starts bright, hopeful and funny. By the end it’s a tangled gloomy mess that’s strangely still hopeful, the protagonist emptied out but not empty.

With its cool premise, great descriptions and amazing attention to emotion and relationships, “Five-Star Stranger” is a strong debut, and Tang an author to keep an eye on.

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