Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream - Hardcover

Derbyshire, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312140444 ISBN 13: 9780312140441

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1996

Synopsis

Former Red Guard and middle-aged Chinese immigrant Chai pursues an obsession with the late American president Calvin Coolidge, while Chai's wife, Ding, is forced to save their marriage when he is tempted by a women from his past

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Reviews

Initially a gritty portrait of a shirt-on-his-back mainland Chinese emigre, Derbyshire's first novel segues into a credulity-stretching but enjoyable flight of fancy. We first meet narrator Chai and his wife, Ding, at home on Long Island, during an evening of Scrabble and moon cakes. A former Red Guard whose disaffection with Maoism was accelerated by witnessing politically excused rapes and killings during the Cultural Revolution, Chai has come to this bourgeois life through a circuitous route. Escaping China by swimming to Hong Kong, he rose from messenger to banking executive, attaining a hard-to-swallow mastery of Western culture in part by memorizing David Copperfield. All along, he has worshipped a sequence of heroes, from Lu Xun, an iconoclastic Chinese writer of the 1920s and '30s, to Calvin Coolidge, and he still thinks about Selina, a young Hong Kong receptionist who broke his heart 20 years ago. Now Chai learns that Selina is living in Cambridge, Mass., and he decides to rekindle their relationship. Ding's ploy to avert this tryst is a delightful, subtle bit of silliness and includes a hilarious scene in which Chai thinks he is being chided by Coolidge's ghost. Derbyshire clearly knows Eastern and Western mores, and those willing to overlook the novel's plot dissonance should enjoy this debut both as a lighthearted romantic romp and as a knowing literary study of the tensions between self-discipline and determinism.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A postmodern mess of a debut: earnest and ambitious, but disjointed and strained. Middle-aged T.C. Chai is a former Chinese Red Guard whose father died in the Korean War. Although Chai lived through the Three Bad Years of 1959-61 and the great Cultural Revolution, and swam across the Deep Water Bay en route from China to Hong Kong to America, he is still haunted not by these experiences so much as by a horrific incident from his collegiate Red Guard days. Even when firmly established in Manhattan as a financial analyst for an investment bank, with a lovely wife (also Chinese) and a daughter, and thoroughly entrenched in upper-middle-class urban society (Scrabble, dinner parties, shopping), Chai can't come to terms with ``the rape.'' Years ago, Chai's group of Guards had been bent on harassing a ``counterrevolutionary'' history professor. The group's leader, Yu, convinced his companions, including Chai, not only to destroy the professor's house and grounds but to assault the professor's teenage daughter. Though Chai had only pretended to rape the girl, his guilt as a participant and silent bystander runs deep; in his anguish, he draws a parallel between the rape and the Cultural Revolution, which unleashed an unfocused, irrational ``lust to destroy'' within the nation. Chai's troubled past has contributed to his fascination with ``dead thinkers,'' including Dr. Samuel Johnson, but it is the relatively obscure, seldom- studied Calvin Coolidge who becomes Chai's obsession, and it is Coolidge's voice and spirit that guide him in his transition into American life and in his struggle to come to grips with his past. The trouble isn't just that the story itself, however intense in background, is so slight but that the Coolidge hook--which is meant to make everything else resonate--is dull and confusing and just doesn't lift when lifting is needed. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312140444
• ISBN 13: 9780312140441
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 273