A book review of Deplorable Conversations With Cats and Other Distractions by Yeoh Jo-Ann.

THE WEEK COCONUT, his late sister’s cat, starts speaking to him, Lucky Lee has to decide if he has gone mad, he is dreaming, or if the cat really is talking to him—which brings to mind CS Lewis’ oft-quoted passage from Mere Christianity about whether Jesus was a liar, a lunatic or the Lord.

Luckily, the stakes are much lower here. No one is asking you to believe in Lucky. You just need to be amenable to meandering through Singapore and Malaysia, flitting from desperate present to secretive past, through varying episodes of grief and depression as he tries to figure out his life without the one person who has defined it so far: his sister, Pearl.

And when I say meander, I mean meander. Deplorable Conversations With Cats and Other Distractions is a long read. It wanders almost purposelessly down random thoughts, jumping from person to person, in an omniscient narrative that lets you know what almost every character in the story is thinking. Except Coconut. No one knows what Coconut is thinking, except the cat herself.

At times, this narrative style irks me. It feels too much like head hopping, tossing you from one person’s thoughts to another. Stick to one person, I want to yell. Yet, it all somehow works cohesively. Reading the other characters’ reactions towards Lucky’s strange actions just adds to the humour and surrealism of the situation.

A Truly Magical look At Southeast Asia

Deplorable Conversations is set in modern Singapore and Malaysia, with westernisation and gentrification as constant touchpoints. There are brief stops in other countries in the region, mostly on the hunt for food or coffee. As a Malaysian reader, there is much to love— the places and spaces they inhabit are familiar ones, the sounds and expressions pleasant to the ear.

Yeoh is not afraid to dip into Malay, Hokkien and a little bit of Cantonese. And the food! There is so much food you will probably be salivating throughout the book. Yeoh is a keen observer of society, expressing the older generations’ frustrations with the younger even while the latter collectively roll their eyes at the outdated views of their parents’ generation. “Go to school and learn English, then forget how to be Chinese,” Mr. Thiang gripes right on the first page. Why else would those crazy kids next door put up white paper lanterns for Christmas?

It reads like real life, albeit a tai tai-esque version of it. The only thing that is out of place in this ultra-realistic setting is the talking cat. The talking cat that only talks to one person in the whole book, not even to her beloved owner, Pearl.

“She didn’t need me to,” Coconut says. And no other cat speaks to Lucky. Is the talking cat a coping mechanism? Is it Lucky’s own mind telling him what to do? After all, there are many times when Coconut sounds just like Pearl. And what does she mean that he needs it? Because his bully of a sister is not around to direct his life anymore?

There is little closure to Pearl’s death except time. Lucky waits and waits for her return, hoping against hope that they will find her, that she is strong enough— she was always the strong one—to survive, and that it is only a matter of time before she strides into the house again to tell him what to do.

She never does.

On Family and Community

At the beginning, Pearl seems to be a benign image, a beloved sister lost. But the more you delve into Lucky’s memories, the more you discover that she is a bully who takes out her anger and issues on her younger brother without remorse. Despite Lucky’s neutral tone and even the longing that comes through, I find myself despising Pearl. She is not a nice person, and it is obvious she has inherited their father’s disdain for weak-willed Lucky. “She meant well” is an excuse for Pearl’s behaviour, but it does not mean it had had positive impact.

A thought that captures me at various points is: Would Lucky have been a different person without Pearl? I think so. After all, he has always lived in her shadow, even before she became a famous TV personality. There is a strange co-dependency to their relationship that does neither any favours.

Half of the novel is Lucky’s journey to discover his inheritance; a road trip that takes him to discover his father’s roots in Malaysia. It is a search for meaning amid loss and grief—including a disenfranchised grief born of family secrets and the practical support that had always been withheld from oh-so-flighty Lucky. What would he have become if given a fighting chance? If he had not been subsumed in Pearl’s personality all these thirty-odd years?

Maybe Pearl’s death is the best thing that could happen to Lucky. Maybe it is not a tragedy after all.

Because ultimately, Lucky has a great support system and a community that rallies around him in his time of need. They may not always do it the right way, but their presence (and meddling) is the solid foundation that redirects his path, madness or not.

The book is a delightful read, both hilarious and poignant. Lucky has two obsessions that keep coming up throughout the novel: architecture and coffee. They are possibly Yeoh’s own obsessions, an insight into the author herself—Yeoh’s degree is in Architecture, though she never practised (just like Lucky!), and when I met up with her in Penang, she had many opinions about coffee and coffee culture—though I am not sure if those were formed before or after writing the novel.

If you have ever needed a novel about coffee, cats and architecture that hits close to home, this is the book for you.