The Crazed by Ha Jin
Sayers, Valerie
BOOKS The road to Tiananmen The Crazed Ha Jin Pantheon, $24,323 pp. Valerie Sayers Ha Jin, who immigrated to the United States from China in 1985, has already published an impressive body of...
...Horrified by his own cowardice, he undertakes the rescue of a little boy, as if he is redeeming his own youthful mistakes...
...Before this busy action takes the novel off into the satisfying territory of plot consummation, the pages of The Crazed are also filled with satisfying meditations on language itself, on the connections or lack of connections between language and action...
...His professor is dead, his fiancee has abandoned him, and he is now a young man without a career...
...Jian is most perplexed by his professor's disavowal of the scholar's life, which he declares has reduced him to the role of a clerk...
...The novel's climax is utterly realistic and utterly involving its movement out of the sickroom and into the streets of Beijing provides just the right change of perception and scale...
...Gradually, however, Jian begins to believe his professor's warnings about the scorn heaped on true intellectuals, and decides to abandon his exams and to seek instead a position in the Policy Office...
...Jian sees language as romantic (and in a funny aside says that women who study foreign languages are more romantic than their peers...
...And his very particular crisis, in the midst of his country's very particular crisis, becomes universal by virtue of its precise and passionate telling...
...He recalls visualizing The Inferno during his torture sessions: "I'd imagine that the crazed people below and around me were like the blustering evil-doers, devils, and monsters cast into hell...
...Jian and his professor quote Rilke, Pound, Li Po...
...Valerie Sayers Ha Jin, who immigrated to the United States from China in 1985, has already published an impressive body of fiction and poetry in English...
...This is a novel about finding one's soul, about wanting to live, as Jian finally says, "actively and meaningfully...
...He, too, is crazed as he watches his country come to crisis...
...Jian Wan and another student are assigned to care for him while his wife makes her way back from a veterinary mission to Tibet and the hospital nurses busy themselves with their embroidery...
...Jian wonders, naturally, if this means his professor sees himself in Christian terms, but the older man denies that he is religious...
...The narrator, Jian Wan, is a graduate student studying for his Ph.D...
...As the novel opens, however, his professor has suffered a stroke and is hospitalized, slipping in and out of hallucinations and fantasies...
...His short stories, which often appear in annual prize volumes, are odd and arresting compressions of Chinese life: a gay man takes an unattractive bride but is revealed and punished...
...Suffering can refine the soul...
...He, too, struggles to find purpose in his life...
...His own language is direct and often emotional in a nineteenth-century way: "My heart was shaking, filled with pity, dismay, and disgust...
...The direct expression of emotion complements the subtle wit and irony that inform the narrative...
...While reciting The Divine Comedy in my heart, I felt that my suffering was meant to help me enter purgatory...
...The straightforward narrative gives way to the dramatic at times, to the operatic as Jian's professor rants...
...The crazed themselves are a graceful motif woven through the minds of the characters...
...entrance exams, which he hopes will propel him to Beijing University and marriage to his beloved professor's daughter...
...His speeches recreate his sufferings during the Cultural Revolution, when he was declared a Demon Monster and made to wear signs and carry buckets of water designed to bend his body and his spirit...
...The wife's presence in Tibet and the nurses' leisurely approach to medical crisis are typical of the novel's opening, with its matter-of-fact portrayal of a China populated by cynics and fanatics, "a paradise for idiots...
...Many of the professor's monologues and spoken dreams, which are designed to unveil his biography as well as to move the plot along, are ridiculously contrived in dramatic terms, yet their language is so direct that they remain strangely compelling...
...As the army attacks the gathering students, he aids a wounded woman but then abandons her...
...Stark images a boy stung by a scorpion cries for hours on the hillside alternate with Jian's straightforward interior monologue...
...Like all of us, Jian must act or lose his soul...
...He intersperses memories of his sexual liaisons and his own ambitions with his talk of the spirit, and Jian is alternately revolted and moved to pity...
...Ha Jin's first novel, Waiting, which won the National Book Award, is a beautiful and mysterious meditation on the meaning of inaction as well as an allegory of post-Cultural Revolution China...
...Overwrought adverbs such as "desperately" make frequent appearances and why not...
...In an age when so many critics have declared the death of literary realism, Ha Jin's depiction of real absurdity and absurd reality is a good argument against realism's premature burial...
...His journey to Beijing grants him a classical moment of epiphany...
...The fiction is realistic the settings are rendered meticulously but the plots seesaw between political absurdity on a grand scale and individual suffering in its smallest detail...
...Thwarted by a Communist Party official, Jian ultimately joins the student demonstrations not because of his political beliefs but, as he says, for personal reasons...
...a little girl observes her miserable kindergarten teacher and learns her first lessons in deceit...
...The patient is in a death struggle and declares that he must save his soul but admits, "I'm afraid I'm not worthy of my suffering...
...The irony is typical Ha Jin and would be delicious if the novel were not already moving so relentlessly toward the massacre in Beijing...
...I had hope...
...Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of five novels...
...the American Cowboy Chicken franchise opens a branch in a provincial city, and its workers become consumed with capitalist envy...
...The Crazed, his new novel, is also a compelling read, more directly political than Waiting, more focused on an inevitable plot march that will end in Tiananmen Square...
Vol. 130 • February 2003 • No. 3
