Taiwan makes an appearance when Red is described as humming a tune by the local pop singer Zhao Chuan in the shower: "I'm just a little bird who wants to fly, but I never seem to get too high/ I'm still searching for a bit of sky." Cross-strait cultural links, you feel, will never be the same again.
In a cynical mood, I could opt to say that there's just about enough material in this novel for three short stories. And even on the most charitable of days it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the author has been fortunate to have her work published by an arm of the international corporate giant Random House. One imagines they envisage a largely teenage readership for this tale of adolescent woe followed by a degree of success in young adulthood (the narrator is successfully holding down a job in a video-rental store when the story opens). The author's actual success as a filmmaker and published novelist is, of course, far in excess of this.
Given the book's modest level of accomplishment, the publisher's claim that it's "a novel of breathtaking beauty" is merely the latest example of the profit-hungry exaggerations that very large publishers are increasingly addicted to. It's probably a matter of someone in a sales and promotion department feeling their job's at risk if they don't hype the latest product sufficiently absurdly. These corporate hirelings' worries as to what they'll say when a real masterpiece emerges must trouble their sleep.
This, in other words, is a readable but un-world-shattering piece of work that if it were set in Cleveland, Ohio would have already been rejected by a hundred publishers. China, though, once despised and rejected, is now the flavor of the month. But there's corporate values for you. Tomorrow it could be Easter Island.
RSS