Run Club

Sandy Luu is a depressed, underemployed Vietnamese American woman in Los Angeles who joins a guided running app. She then becomes obsessed with the app’s handsome narrator and slowly turns self-improvement into stalking. The book wants to be a satire of wellness culture, parasocial intimacy, immigrant-family trauma, bad relationships, corporate misery and the strange way “bettering yourself” can become another form of delusion. It has a funny premise, but the execution is repetitive and the satire often confuses cruelty with insight.

Sandy begins as an administrative assistant at Pandelson and Company, a family-owned accounting firm where she does humiliatingly pointless office work: scanning, hole-punching, stapling, reprinting pages and catering to the bosses’ absurd preferences. The Pandelsons are wealthy, self-congratulatory, racist in a liberal-corporate way, and obsessed with their children’s accomplishments. Sandy is employed partly because Cherise Pandelson, who is Chinese, likes having young Asian workers around the office, though most of those workers are Southeast Asian and clearly not part of the same class world.

Sandy’s personal life is just as bleak. She lives with Pete Tan, a mostly unemployed boyfriend who spends his days watching YouTube videos, developing conspiracy-adjacent opinions, failing to shower regularly, and criticizing everything she likes. Their relationship is dead, but they stay together because rent is expensive and because Pete’s stubborn loyalty gives Sandy a degraded version of love. She barely likes him, but he has stayed through her repeated attempts to cheat or break up with him, and that endurance has become proof of devotion.