Maggie Su’s debut novel offers unique look at humanity

“Blob: A Love Story” by Maggie Su (Harper)

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the uncertainty of the geopolitical moment, it seems appropriate to start 2025 with some surreal fiction.

So how about “Blob: A Love Story,” starring a Taiwanese-American named Vi, who stumbles upon a “beige gelatin splotch” with mouth, eyes, and lips, next to a trash can outside a dive bar, takes it home, feeds it and helps it morph into a real man?

That’s the plot summary in brief, and it’s a whole lot weirder than that. First-time novelist Maggie Su has fun letting Vi essentially mold her ideal man — “He doesn’t look like any one movie star but rather a conglomeration of movie stars” — but the story isn’t played entirely for laughs. Creating and interacting with Bob the blob (yes, that’s the name she gives him. It?) gives Vi plenty of time to think about her own life. She’s uneasy about the way she treats so-called friends and has not yet come to terms with a recent breakup.

In other words, she’s a 20-something trying to figure herself out who has a lot of growing up to do. She dropped out of college and works a dead-end front desk job at the Hillside Inn and Suites. She isn’t very nice to most of the people she spends time with throughout the story — from her co-workers to her family. But nurturing Bob convinces her that fresh starts are possible. “He’s so pure. Anything I do or say could taint him,” she thinks at one point.

Of course, blobs who transform into humans also develop feelings. It’s our brains that differentiate us from the rest of the animal kingdom, after all. So when Bob escapes Vi’s apartment and meets other people, Vi’s very good looking Frankenstein monster is no longer hers. Whose or what is he, though? That’s a question Su could probably write another book about. In this one, she’s content to leave Vi in a better place than where she started, all thanks to a random encounter with a blob.  ROB MERRILL, MDT/AP