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Katie Goh\u2019s \u201cForeign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange\u201d bills itself as a memoir constructed alongside an odyssey of the orange. This caught my attention. I had been searching for something to scratch this particular genre-clash itch. Something with a personal narrative that makes a small aspect of the world make more sense \u2014 maybe in an annoying philosophical way, but in a grounded one too. One that transforms my preconceptions of something I already know. A weird mesh of microhistory and memoir, something along the lines of Lulu Miller\u2019s \u201cWhy Fish Don\u2019t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life,\u201d or Caitlin Doughty\u2019s \u201cSmoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory.\u201d These books accomplished this blend well. They had a dynamic personal narrative. Their nonfiction subject felt justified. \u201cForeign Fruit\u201d also felt promising. It even had a lengthy subtitle. I eagerly peeled back the bright orange cover to the pithy pages, ready to completely re-envision the orange.<\/p>\n
\u201cForeign Fruit\u201d has all of the markings of what the emerging memoir-microhistory genre demands. It has philosophy, or clumsily-implemented mentions of rhizomes<\/a> and symbolic myth.<\/a> It has a segmented personal narrative, starting, ending and interspersed with one moment where Goh \u2014 after hearing about six Asian women who had been murdered during the rise in Asian hate crimes<\/a> fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic \u2014 describes eating five oranges back to back at her kitchen table. And, finally, it has the orange, containing \u201cmetaphors, dreams, mythologies, superstitions, parables, and histories, all held within its tough rind.\u201d Goh completes most of the criteria for books of this sort, but what she doesn\u2019t manage to pull off is something more integral.\u00a0<\/p>\n Goh can\u2019t seem to pin down exactly what this book is about. She muses about different aspects of what the orange could mean, what the clementine\u2019s origins could have been. Even the central concept of oranges is something she expands to all citrus fruits, occasionally jumping into pomelos and fruit as a whole. She introduces so many starting points, so many paths the orange could take, that exploring them all would exceed the scope of the barely 200-page novel.\u00a0<\/p>\n Goh clearly has a passion for and a curiosity about oranges, but she lacks an angle. The more explicitly nonfiction passages feel rote and limited. In one chapter, she describes a trip she took explicitly for the writing of this book, but in others the historical context is introduced only by a paragraph break, completely severed from her own narrative or reasons to be looking into the niches of the orange\u2019s history. It\u2019s disjointed. She says of her research trip that she \u201cknew (she) would soon be reaching the end of the orange\u2019s journey.\u201d <\/strong>But it\u2019s hard to see why, when she had spent the previous chapter discussing pomelo farmers. This conflation of the central orange metaphor with other citrus stories becomes way too broad for us to ever feel like we are making any headway into the historical part of the novel.\u00a0<\/p>\n