'Real Americans' asks: What could we change about our lives?
Many philosophical ideas get an airing in Rachel Khong's latest novel, including the existence of free will and the ethics of altering genomes to select for "favorable" inheritable traits.
"The trouble with beginnings is that there's no such thing," muses the narrator of Rachel Khong's debut novel Goodbye, Vitamin. "What's a beginning but an arbitrary point of entry? You begin when you're born, I guess, but it's not like you know anything about that."
The difficulty of demarcating starting points also animates Khong's new book, , which begins at least four times: The book is carved up into three novella-length sections, each told from the perspective of a different character, plus a prologue. Khong's latest begins, faute de mieux, with a short set piece in
