Over the weekend, I read Ha Jin’s new novel, A Free Life.
Now, I’ll reiterate that I did read it over the weekend and it is over 600 pages long. So am I saying that I read it so quickly because it was mesmerizing, engrossing and I couldn’t put it down?
I don’t think so.
Isn’t that odd?
(Caveat: I’d not read any of Jin’s previous work. This was selected, as is my wont, from the “New Arrivals” section at the library. I stood there and read the first chapter – about a young couple awaiting their young son arriving in the US from China soon after Tiammen Square in 1989 – which made me want to read more. So I checked it out. Along with Lost Empires by J. B. Priestly, plucked from the shelf while I was looking for something else which I never ended up finding and the title of which I can’t even remember now.)
The story: Nan came to the US to pursue a Ph.D. in political science at Brandeis. After the massacre, he leaves the program for a couple of reasons and begins life as in the US on different terms, determined to make his own way – with the ultimate dream of being a poet. The novel follows Nan, his wife Pingping and their young son from Massachusetts down to a suburb of Atlanta where they purchase a Chinese restaurant. Various friends and acquaintances pepper their lives: other Chinese nationals, an American couple who end up adopting a baby from China, scholars, poets, and so on. The struggles are what you would expect to find, what we might venture to label the “typical” immigrant experience: worry, feelings of inferiority, fear, homesickness, displacement, political conflict played out in a foreign land, concerns about the second generation,  and very hard work that ultimately leads to a succesful business and a home of one’s own.
On one level, I enjoyed it simply because I appreciated the world Jin was created – the immigrant experience has always been of great interest to me, with my own tenuous ties to same – my mother being French-Canadian, if not by birth, but by origin, and knowing what little I do of that experience – as well as my interest in American Catholic history, which is the history, among other things, of immigration. I’m fascinated by the movement of peoples, assimilation, resistance to same, loss of culture,  and that knotty question of what exactly makes one an American.  I also appreciated the southern setting of most of the novel – not that I have any great intimacy with Atlanta, I know enough to have my sense of place confirmed by Jin’s descriptions. (He spent time teaching at Emory – just like one of his characters. In fact, John Updikes’ New Yorker review helpfully pulls the autobiographical threads together.)
But…Yeah, but. The writing. It was just really odd, and a stark contrast to my recent two-week long dalliance with John Gardner (about whom I need to blog soon), whose Mickelson’s Ghost was lush, overwritten, bristling with tangents and fully of swampy interiority (and enjoyable in a different way.) English is not Jin’s native language and what I wondered as I read is if he was doing some sort of massive meta-narrative thing here, since Nan’s major intellectual struggle is with his desire to be a poet – but a poet, he finally decides, writing in English. The novel’s language is simple and declarative. It exists mostly in the present moment, there are few metaphors (and those tend to be awkward), there is no thread of reflection running through the work. The language doesn’t invite us to anything beyond the events described on the page, just then, just as they are. It’s, as I said, simply written, with chapter endings that wrap up what just happened very prosaically, leading nowhere.
That’s not a criticism, just a comment. What I started to wonder if the simplicity was completely intentional, and not just a byproduct of English being Jin’s second language. If he was bringing us into the immigrant experience in another way – through the language barrier. Near the end, Nan is encouraged to write an autobiography instead of poetry, and he declines, but the thought occurred to me that perhaps that is exactly what we are reading, and the stiltedness, simplicity and very keen present-ness is intended to show us the immigrant struggle to make sense of this foreign land, to think on its terms, to speak its language, and in that experience there is little time for the luxury of metaphor or extensive reflection – there is mostly now.