What, then, are we to say about this book? First, it displays the character of a great deal of Chinese fiction that has appeared in English over the last decade. The less pleasant bodily aspects are very much to the fore -- stinking breath, piss, phlegm and the rest all contribute to the sense of uproarious comedy. This is the number one hallmark of Chinese comedy and seems to act as a release from the constraints of conforming to official ideology. Let's drink, let's fart, let's vomit all over the place to show we're human (and aren't breaking any laws about not saying this or that by doing so). This is something, incidentally, that Chinese comic novels have in common with many 18th-century English ones, also reacting, it could be argued, against an over-formal, over-repressive society.
The Noodle Maker proceeds with vignettes of a girl who wants to entertain an audience by committing suicide on stage by putting her head into the jaws of a tiger; of a failed author who expresses his resentment of his much more successful novelist wife by using his power as an editor to seduce aspiring young female writers (21 of them to date); and a story in which dogs are imagined taking over society.
Amid the comedy Ma has his serious moments, and very impressive some of them are. Take this passage, from a story of a letter-writer who becomes too involved in the affairs of those whose letters he's writing.
"We grew up in a spiritual vacuum, cut off from the rest of the world. A wasted generation. When the country started to open up, we were the first to fall. Foreign culture is the only religion now, but we have no means to understand it, or appreciate its worth. Half a century gone by, and suddenly we find ourselves in the forest of modern life without a map or a compass. How can a society numbed by dictatorship ever find its way in the modern world? We are unable to think things through for ourselves, we have no reference points, we feel lost and out of depth. We put on a show of superficial arrogance to hide our low self-esteem."
This book, despite its formal shortcomings, is a notable contribution to the growth of an international literature, a globalized one if you will. Structural weaknesses there may be, but Ma is doing something admirable and even necessary. It's not as engrossing as Red Dust but, if viewed in its historical perspective, it is at the very least an interesting, and at best a revealing and entertaining, read.
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