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CHINA GIRL

AND OTHER STORIES

A well-crafted and welcome short-fiction debut.

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Lin follows the lives of dreamers and agitators in this debut collection of stories.

In “Ghost Wife,” a Chinese-American man in Beijing begins a relationship with a woman whom he met after her scalp was ripped off by a wild dog. A Communist Party official is tasked with babysitting a journalist, making sure that the curious writer doesn’t see anything that he could use to criticize the government in “National Holiday.” A minor altercation between two people on a San Francisco subway in “Charge” becomes a focal point for all the frustration that either person has experienced in their lives up to that point. In each of these nine stories, Lin follows Chinese people as they struggle with their political, cultural, and personal baggage, and he provides insights into the mysteries of human interaction. In the title story, for example, a Chinese model/exotic dancer moves numbly between the arenas of her existence—amorous, familial, social—while also longing for a new life that she can’t bring herself to live. She sets the tone for the rest of Lin’s characters, who often wish to escape from situations they didn’t choose for themselves—and from some they did. “One could almost believe them to be comatose if not for their moving bodies, their jerky attempts at spontaneity,” observes the model about her fellow dancers. “A nation of stone-faced ballroom dancers, she concludes sadly—sure you can learn the foxtrot and the waltz like you memorize poems, but what does that get you?” It isn’t all cynicism, though, as the author also provides a world large enough for his characters to dream in. As the woman who briefly loses her scalp says, “You know China is so big that every story you hear must be true, somewhere? Lin writes with a natural lyricism and a wondrous ability to render the spontaneity of human thought, as in “Litany, Eulogy”: “My sister with the bouncy head, and the arm I slammed in a car door once, because I was lazy enough to do it. Her face went all red as a result, and she never seemed more alive.” He’s willing to experiment with form, as well; the tale “Floating World” is subtitled “A Film Treatment,” and its structure is just that—describing its characters’ actions from a distance in clipped, malleable language. “Blood-Stained Heroes” offer a series of vignettes that follow several people in the midst of high-pressure situations—a child fleeing his father’s punishment, combatants in a gangland gun battle, a calligraphist auditioning to join the emperor’s court. The story leaps from one player to another in a manner that always keeps the reader unsteady. Overall, these tales all feel very much of a piece, with shared themes of isolation, identity crises, and interconnectedness along with some recurring character types. Along the way, Lin manages to crystallize a set of concerns of a specific, unique group of people while also managing to make them feel universal and timeless.

A well-crafted and welcome short-fiction debut.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-58790-403-5

Page Count: 202

Publisher: Regent Press

Review Posted Online: June 12, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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