The City in Glass by Nghi Vo: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

The City in Glass, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom 978-1250348272, $24.99, 224pp), October 2024.

Nghi Vo is full of surprises. I suppose one could argue that her first novel, the Gatsbyesque The Chosen and the Beautiful, and her second, the very different Hollywood fantasy historical The Siren Queen, had a few things in common – like early 20th-century American settings and the classic themes of the need for acceptance and a passion for self-invention – but neither at first seemed to have much of anything to do with her ongoing Singing Hills series of five novel­las, with its distinctly non-Western sensibility. That series seems fascinated with the varieties and genres of storytelling, with a wandering archivist a very appropriate choice for a central figure. But even that doesn’t quite prepare us for The City in Glass, whose central characters are a proud demon and a deeply conflicted angel and whose setting – the fabulous city of Azril – is effectively a major character all on its own. What it does have in common with those earlier novellas is the manner in which Vo continues to explore the possibilities of the novella as a form. Both collectively and individually, the Singing Hills stories implied a much broader epic-scale background, and the story of Azril takes this to a new level, covering centuries of growth and destruction, artistic and literary movements, religious manias, commerce and trade agreements, invasions, wars, plagues and even immigration problems. On the one hand, it’s a beautifully written meditation on loss, reparation, and redemption; on the other, it’s urban planning for demons.

The demon in question is Vitrine, who ‘‘in the beginning… was a glass cabinet, six-sided and joined at the edges with dull gray lead flash­ing’’ (which is what vitrine actually means in French cabinetry). The cabinet, which contains a single book, is effectively the demon’s heart. The city of Azril has been Vitrine’s special project for generations, but when a team of vengeful angels show up to lay waste to it dur­ing the annual Summersend celebration, she is helpless to protect it, though she does attack one angel, embedding a part of herself in it. Aided by a handful of survivors, a few ghosts, and her own memories, Vitrine sets about try­ing to rebuild the devastated city, where even the clay in the riverbanks had been ‘‘baked to near-porcelain hardness by the blast’’ (echoes of old nuclear-horror stories!) Through years, and then decades, and eventually more than three centuries, Vitrine tries to rebuild the city, sometimes with the assistance of genera­tions of intriguing secondary characters, such as an artist, a wealthy pirate’s daughter, and an ambitious young swordsman. At the same time, she begins to develop an unlikely relationship with the one angel who she had managed to fight, who has now become something of an exile himself.

The City in Glass features some of Vo’s most elegant and haunting prose, but it’s by no means a conventionally plotted novel. Vitrine is a com­plex and fascinating figure, by no means perfect – she resists allowing a group of refugees to help rebuild the population because they aren’t ‘‘her people’’ – but she lacks a clear antagonist, and the almost romantic relationship with the angel who becomes her friend is late to develop. The motives of the marauding angels are never clearly explained, and much of the suspense derives from the question of whether the long process of rebuilding will only lead to another round of divine retribution. But this is why, far more than in most tales, the city itself functions as a central character: It learns, makes mistakes, suffers grief and relearns how to celebrate, and sometimes rebelliously defies Vitrine’s best-laid plans. Such an ambitious historical narrative could easily have filled hundreds more pages, or even volumes, but Vo’s almost restrained mastery of the novella form leaves us with not only the sweeping sense of an implied epic, but the elegance of a well-told parable.

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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.

This review and more like it in the September 2024 issue of Locus.

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