Author Ha Jin’s latest novel, “The Boat Rocker,” follows an expatriate journalist who becomes embroiled in intrigue as he investigates a most unusual novel. Steven Senne The Associated Press.
Ha Jin hasn’t made a secret of his separation from China — not only physically, having lived in the United States since the mid-1980s, but in beliefs, practices, even personality.
His novels have featured a spy torn between loyalties to two countries; a fictional account from Chinese internment camps in America; and a calligrapher chafing against the Chinese bureaucracy.
His novels also have explored the distance between cultures in ways both oblique and transparent, but his new novel reads as a more direct and personal criticism of China.
More specifically, “The Boat Rocker” concerns the relationship of journalists and novelists to the Chinese government.
Jin has tended to explore large cultural issues through smaller, more intimate relationship dynamics, and he doesn’t break the habit with this book.
The story, set in 2005, revolves around a Chinese expatriate, Feng Danlin. He works as a journalist in New York at a “Global News Network” agency, not quite at the muckraking levels of a Mother Jones reporter, but enough to have established a reputation with other expatriates living in the U.S. as a writer whose articles challenge Chinese government thinking.
This does not make Danlin popular with the Chinese government, though his influence is somewhat questionable — the pains he takes to portray himself as a modern-day Bob Woodward suggest a somewhat inflated sense of self.
Danlin’s personal life has suffered from his dogged pursuit of the truths in Chinese/American affairs. Divorced, he lives with a premed student in what seems to be a relationship of convenience. And convenience doesn’t hold up well under pressure, which comes in spades with his new assignment.
Danlin has been given the job of investigating a new romance novel, “Love and Death in September.” Something is unusual about the book: Danlin’s employer secures a copy for review and finds it sorely lacking in value, essentially a poorly written steamy romance novel mashed together with a trite retelling of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Yet it’s supposedly getting early rave reviews, including one from George W. Bush, and an extremely rare endorsement from China’s ruling Communist party, declaring the book emblematic of the outstanding relationship between China and the U.S.
The icing on the cake is that the book is written by Danlin’s ex-wife — she divorced him shortly after he came to the United States — and that connection proves to be Danlin’s weakness, as well as a weakness of “The Boat Rocker” as a whole.
As Danlin pursues his investigation, he repeatedly finds himself tripped up by Chinese authorities, with the resources of an entire nation to aim at the reporter’s efforts, and by his own emotions, his “thought I was over it but apparently not” resentment toward his ex.
Where “The Boat Rocker” fails is in delivering any sense of narrative tension.
Long-time readers of Jin know better than to expect a potboiler of political suspense that is neatly tied up with a bow. At the same time, it’s hard not to wish Jin had done a little bit more with the possibilities: distrust between the countries, between the man and woman, between publisher and author.
When the end result is a book that feels more like the fictional “Love and Death in September” than a Ha Jin novel, it feels like a lost opportunity.
“The Boat Rocker,” by Ha Jin (240 pages; Pantheon; $25.95)
Source: http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article115374518.html