Han Ong’s new novel, The Disinherited, is one long, unflinching trudge through the Philippines— a don’t-look-away account of everything from the slums of Manila to the rich foreign tourists’ sex clubs to the steely polish of the Manila elite. Roger Caracera, the 44-year-old Americanized son of Filipino sugar baron Jesus Caracera, returns home for his father’s funeral. There, surrounded by his image-obsessed, high-society family, Roger views the world he has left with a mixture of detachment, scorn, and pity. In a move that is as unexpected as it is stubbornly perverse, Roger’s late father leaves him the bulk of his fortune and interests, entwining Roger directly into the corrupt family from whom he is so eager to disengage and a country he thought he’d left behind.

After learning of his inheritance, Roger embarks on a complicated charitable mission that may be somewhere between a midlife and an existential crisis. Instead of returning to New York, Roger stays in the Philippines, intent upon giving away his guilty inheritance to the people of the Negros Occidental Province, the place where his father made his fortune in sugar production. The task becomes more complicated when Roger learns of his deceased Uncle Eustacio legacy, the only other black sheep in the Caracera family. Amidst hushed rumors of his Uncle’s homosexuality, Roger discovers the boy prostitute, Pitik Sindit, who was the object of his Uncle’s amorous obsession. As Roger attempts to rescue Pitik and his mother from the slums, Pitik misinterprets Roger’s assistance as another attempt at love and falls hard for the older man. Meanwhile, however, Roger’s charitable endeavors are proving to be increasingly complex and he himself cannot seem to shake a sort of spiritual lethargy that has him moving dulled and benumbed through the world.

One of the questions lurking beneath the surface of Ong’s tale is just what are we to make of the disaffected Roger. Is he himself gay and frustratingly incapable of recognizing it? Or is he simply stricken with an emotional paralysis that leaves him forever viewing others through a glass pane of detachment? Even as he puzzles over these questions himself, Roger can’t figure out the answer. Ultimately, the implacability of Ong’s main character proves to be something that tests even his own artistic capabilities; rather than transforming Roger’s disengagement into something deep and vexing, Roger eventually just seems rather boring. This is perhaps the fundamental danger of writing such a novel full of such mulish characters—it’s not even that Ong errs towards making all of his characters unsympathetic, it’s that he errs toward making them pessimistic robots.

On the other hand, Ong’s strong suit is how writes a whole country, teeming with sounds and life; how he fills the readers’ ears, eyes, and noses with tennis courts and ejaculating tourists, old ladies with lined foreheads and Catholic priests and over earnest missionaries. The density of scenery and bit characters is much to Ong’s credit as a storyteller. Passages such as the following are examples of what make Ong’s reputation as one of the most talented of the new “global” writers:

The place was in a desolate section of Malate. They cruised past once-festive restaurants and beer gardens which used to be at the center of the tourist trade. The nights were formerly emblazoned with multicolored bulbs like Christmas all year round and were raucous with the sounds of drunken Americans and Japanese and Germans vying for the prettiest of the “hostesses”—bar girls with provincial accents and city-hardened malice. They passed the squatters, who strung their wash out in full view of the streets, and whose children looked up from roughhousing or torturing the neighborhood dogs to regard the family car with bobble-headed incomprehension. They passed gated construction sites beyond which rose tall piles of rusted junk and smoke from hidden vents

Ong raises the dilemma of the Philippines with all its nuances—a dilemma that is echoed in part by the dilemma of the novel’s main character. It is this crisis of Filipino culture in the Philippines that Ong captures so well—a crisis that one of Ong’s characters describes as such, “We were raised in a convent, then released into Hollywood. In between, we were given a sloppy education in business and success.” Much like the novel’s protagonist, the country that Ong so deftly describes in The Disinherited is one also poised between an American identity and something more ineffable; a place that, also much like Roger Caracera, is rife with ambivalence and contradiction.