This book, now in paperback, has been rather successful. For this reviewer, however, it proved hard to love. That it's popular in nature can't be considered a fault, but that it's hard to find an original note struck is more worrying. This is one of those novels where nothing in life in questioned -- no fashions dubbed absurd, no unusual political loyalties espoused, no particularly incisive judgments made. The author makes the narrator and her mother Catholics, but one wonders why. In the event, the fact doesn't count for much -- Caldwell is no Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh.
It's a phenomenon of the age that such books frequently find millions of readers without ever eliciting much critical approval. For anyone who hopes to find a degree of mental stimulus in their reading, the pervasive lack of skepticism is what makes novels like this hard to warm to.
Nevertheless, many readers will judge this a smooth and engaging read. The history of the years 1937 to 1961 is dutifully and fully woven into the narrative, and the characters' lives are shown as having been molded by their voyage over these tumultuous seas. The narrator, though conventional, is by no means insensitive.
The Distant Land of my Father, in other words, is a family saga spanning the Pacific seaboard in the mid-20th century. It casts some light on American-Chinese relations during that era, but essentially is a story of family feelings, very much from the perspective of the women involved. Christmas, birthdays, presents, clothes and personal scents are the markers which punctuate the tale. Political events are taken as read, doctors' opinions are automatically believed and accepted, and the women respond to them both with sensitivity and passivity in roughly equal proportions.
Bo Caldwell has said that she based the story on the life of an uncle. Her grandparents, too, were missionaries in China at the beginning of the 20th century, and their lives will form the basis of this book's successor.
For those who enjoy this kind of extended family tale, to claim to have felt suffocated by the family hugs, the pervading coziness, and the general acceptance of the world as it appears, will be judged heretical, if not barbaric. I can only respond by saying that some comedy, some ideas, and more astringency generally, might have turned this book into a more compelling reading experience. For many readers, however, it may prove just the comforting balm they need. If I felt smothered, maybe that was just my problem.
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