Characters versus types - in The Beauty of Humanity Movement

Would I feel differently about Camilla Gibbs's The Beauty of Humanity Movement if she had an Asian name? I can't say for sure - but I do recall the account of a novel (I think) about a Chicano guy in California that got strong reviews and then it came out that the author was not Chicano but just chose a Spanish-variant pen-name - and that changed everyone's perception of the book. Well, the book should stand or fall on its own, right? But it's hard or even impossible to separate these strands. I can't help but feel - some 70 pages in Beauty - that Gibb sees the characters from the outside, not from the inside, that she is presenting them not as individuals but as types, as representatives of the vast forces that changed, destroyed, shaped life in Vietnam across the past century. Story is about a very poor chef who runs a fly-by-night mobile Pho stand, rumored to be the best in Hanoi, and his reflections on his life; he encounters a very westernized and beautiful Vietnamese woman who comes to him seeking info about her late father, a dissident artist - the chef (Hu?) was on the fringe of the artists' movement, but escaped roundup and re-education because he was a near-illiterate peasant. Much of the story so far also includes his relationship with a mother and young daughter or granddaughter living in squalor near him - he falls in love with the much-younger daughter who seems to be in love with him in return - but the relationship to me feels kind of creepy and I'm not sure how Gibb will develop this. M., who recommended I read this novel, compares it w/ the great A Fine Balance, by Rohintyn Mistry, and there are similarities - particularly in the description of lives in makeshift huts in a squatter's field and the bitterness and competitiveness of life among street vendors and entertainers (his novel set in India), but Mistry's story is epic and full of characters who develop within the time of the novel - whereas Beauty seems to be mostly a story about what happened sometime in the past - a reflective novel rather than an active novel - and perhaps that's the reason that the characters seem to me a product of research rather than of experience. Nothing wrong with that per se - think about War and Peace, for example - but the characters have to come alive as individuals, not just as representatives of social forces, however profound. We'll see how it unfolds and develops, however.