To become a doctor someday, every student must complete a certain number of hours in clinical research, volunteering, and shadowing. There are algorithms to this stuff, to building the perfect résumé for admission to the perfect doctoral program. With this goal in mind, a young pre-med student earns a coveted role in a study about diet and its effects on the human heart, replacing another Asian-American woman from the same school and on a similar college track. The doctor in charge – a middle-aged woman who’d built her career at some of the most elite medical institutions in the country – is erratic and overbearing at first, but her quirks and habits become clearer as the time goes on. Faced with the stark realities of the doctor’s life within and outside of the lab, the student must take stock of her ambitions and her own place in the world.

Reading ’Shadowing’ was hard work. It’s an anxious tale about anxious, unhappy people who are pretending to be happy and successful, exemplars of the roles they’re filling. It was unsettling to read because there was a dissonance between the storytelling style and the content of the story; a dissonance that echoed the dissonance between the polished perfection of the look-how-interesting-and-unique-I-am resumé the protagonist is dutifully polishing and her experience of the life she’s leading. It was a story that had me constantly searching for its meaning, which, again, echoed the protagonist’s mostly unspoken questioning of her own choices.

It wasn’t a satisfying story to read. I don’t think it was meant to be. It was an uncomfortable read. A little hollow. Which, I think, was the point. Our protagonist is standing in the doctor’s shadow and the shadow of the ambitions that other people have for her. She seems stalled, tentative, almost eager to fail so she can move on.

The storytelling style was oblique. On the surface, it seemed factual, almost dryly so, like a scientific paper that lacks anything significant to say. Yet it’s a story full of insights into people: the woman telling the story, the woman she works for, the competitive system that spends time polishing resumés, apparently to make candidates more attractive but actually to force them into greater compliance. But the insights are left for the reader to construct, in the same way that a pointillist painting forces the eye to make shapes from a painting without lines.