The Review of Contemporary Fiction

A Free Life, by Ha Jin
reviewed by Daniel Garrett

 

A Free Life by Ha Jin, the author of Waiting and War Trash and the winner of National Book and PEN/Faulkner awards, is the first book-length fiction that the China-born writer and Boston University professor has set in the United States; and the novel is brave, entertaining, and very intelligent, but, for all its immense imagination and truth, it is an imperfect work. The book, about a would-be writer man who marries a woman friend he is not in love with and how together they build a family and a business, gives us several stories: it is an immigrant success tale, an evocation of the creation of a poetic sensibility, a slow unfolding of how a man comes to appreciate his devoted wife, a political protest against a country (China) that asks too much personal sacrifice and a warning regarding another country whose methods can be amoral and its rewards corrupting (America), and it is, finally, about spiritual development and reconciliation. The many words in the novel are like bricks, and this is a book built word by word, brick by brick, and it is a possibly too large though sturdy structure, but some of the words—not of the narrator’s native tongue—are oddly chosen, oddly shaped. That has two effects—one, it makes the story of immigrant strangeness and assimilation even more believable (the language itself is the evidence of both mastery and the fact that certain tones and meanings remain elusive); and two, one reads and stops, trying to decide when an awkward word choice is accidental or intentional—and that means that the reader is not ever entirely in the story. Consequently, the novel, an ambitious and admirable book, which has something of the style of a nineteenth-century English novel, also carries a contemporary eccentricity.