Review | Kevin Chong’s middle-aged hero in his new book ‘The Double Life of Benson Yu’ hopes for a comeback by healing old wounds

In the inaugural chapters of “The Double Life of Benson Yu,” Kevin Chong’s narrator concedes that his best days — and worst — have been over for years. With both his “era of Peak Fame” and adolescence (where “unspeakable things transpired”) in the rearview, this middle-aged hero remains deeply unsettled. When the distant past resurfaces in the form of a letter, Benson’s turmoil inspires an autobiographical new project he succinctly conveys to his publisher: “All words. No pictures. Child abuse.”

Renowned for “Iggy Samurai,” a ’90s comic-turned-movie-franchise about a solitary lizard-faced warrior, Chong’s author-hero envisions a comeback and fervently hopes that exposing truth will relieve his burden. Reality has other plans, however.

The puzzle pieces of British Columbia writer Chong’s seventh book illustrate the complexity — and heartbreaking arduousness — of healing severe wounds from long ago. The novel’s formal dexterity — story within a story, fiction highlighting its fictiveness, ‘real’ character conversing with his ‘fictional’ creation — is immersive and intriguing. Arguably, chapter by chapter, the technique offers diminishing returns.

With their villains, quests, and “noble feelings,” Benson’s comics wrangled with his personal history. They also simplified it and sidestepped the anguish, shame, and enduring after-effects. Benson, a disgruntled adjunct professor who “cosplays dignity,” now vows to “distill the truth, instead of skirting it with comic book heroics.”

In the story-within-a-story of Benny, Benson introduces a naive alter-ego — part of a “depleted family unit” in Vancouver’s Chinatown about four decades earlier. When Benny’s primary caregiver Poh-Poh dies, the pre-teen fends for himself as best he can until he’s befriended by the Samurai, a delusion-prone man and former psychiatric hospital patient.

While Benson builds this tale from “scraps of memory” he recasts the figure of his corrupt mentor (a sexual predator he calls C.) as an anti-hero. Like C., the new Samurai is a “big white guy”; yet this “funhouse version” has all of C.’s “venom drained.”

Further, as Benson-the-professor types, he pauses to analyze the work. He remarks on tropes in “Asian immigrant tales,” for instance, and comments on characters based on former acquaintances. The self-reflexive fiction takes on funhouse traits too, where truth grows elusive.

Although Benson believes Benny’s story will highlight the “essential falseness and silliness” of his earlier comic books, he seems quite unaware that the current project continues to bypass truth-telling. Aware as well of his “absences, boozing, and erratic parenting,” he seems incapable of breaking his life’s patterns.

In Part Two, Benson informs his wife that someone will be staying with them. This figure — “something between a distant cousin and a clone” — is Benny, transported into Benson’s reality miles and decades from Chinatown.

The abrupt scene change complicates an already knotty story.

In a present day of Teslas and iPhones, Benny resides in the home of his own author and observes, “something about this place seemed askew.” The “rules … that enabled [Benny’s] physical presence were determined outside of me,” Benson comments gnomically.

Ultimately, Chong, like Benson, declines to offer any logical explanation. And while, in the end, Benson confronts a villain and achieves a degree of heroic redemption, the problematic setting has a corrosive effect. Akin to dodgy CGI, it draws the eye to material that diminishes the overall success of the picture.

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