Yan is routinely referred to as China’s most controversial novelist, thanks to his scandalous satires about the brutalities of its Communist past and the moral nullity of its market-driven transformation. In “Serve the People!” (2005), set during the Cultural Revolution, a commander’s wife and her young lover become aroused smashing statuettes of Mao and urinating on his books. Since 2016, almost all of Yan’s work—to date, seventeen novels, as well as short stories, novellas, and volumes of essays—has been subject to an unofficial ban. But his international reputation has grown. He won the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014, has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, and is often mentioned as a likely recipient of the Nobel. Yan’s style is experimental and surreal, and he is credited with developing a strain of absurdism that he terms “mythorealism.” As he puts it, “The reality of China is so outrageous that it defies belief and renders realism inert.”
Henan is ground zero for Yan’s mordant imagination, and in his fiction it becomes a world of remorseless venality—of corrupt local officials, amoral entrepreneurs, and peasants with get-rich-quick schemes that prey on desperation and run on an engine of betrayal. “Some of the most memorable events in history happened here, but, during my lifetime, it’s become one of the poorest places in the country,” he told me. “There is no dignity left, and because of that the people of Henan have felt a deep sense of loss and bitterness.”
But we seem to have reached the point where even the calls to arms are starting to sound like dirges. In the same chapter in which Wadhams argues for better energy policies, he observes that such policies probably can’t—and almost certainly won’t—be put in place fast enough to save the Arctic. Therefore, he says, technologies to block sunlight or change the reflectivity of clouds will have to be deployed. These so-called geoengineering technologies have yet to be tested—if truth be told, they’ve really yet to be invented—but without them, according to Wadhams, the “temperature rise, and the associated further feedbacks, will be too great to allow our civilization to continue.” Apparently, this is supposed to count as inspirational.
It’s hard to say what purpose would be served by a message of straight-up despair; despondency, as it’s often noted, produces its own feedback loop. And yet, scientifically speaking, what alternative is there, as we move into the future, beyond the baiji, and the golden toad, and the reefs, and the sea ice, on toward reëngineering the atmosphere? Lalalalalala, can’t hear you!
While I was a juror in the month-long criminal trial People v. Cohen, I thought the cafeteria at the Airport Courthouse on La Cienega was the most erotic place in Los Angeles. Those nougat-colored floor tiles with flecks of tinny glitter; those fast-food-joint two-tops and metal chairs with red vinyl seats; that steel serving counter. At least once per hour the same speed-freak Flamenco version of The Godfather’s theme song jangled from the playlist, a deranged choice for a courthouse. The object of my desire? High-profile criminal defense attorney Andrew Reed Flier: magnetic, trim, mid-50s, almost as tan as a Manzanita branch. Several of Flier’s past clients have included the former Mets outfielder Lenny Dykstra, who posted Craigslist ads for personal assistants and exposed his genitals to applicants; Swedish former video game executive Bo Stefan Eriksson, who crashed a stolen Ferrari Enzo on the Pacific Coast Highway at 160 miles per hour; and convicted murderer Victor Paleologus, who lured aspiring actresses to isolated locations by offering them roles in James Bond films.
In two different true crime books, Meet Me for Murder and Date with the Devil, author Don Lasseter likens Flier’s “dark, wavy hair and handsomely chiseled features” to JFK Jr.’s, although my best friend, inspecting the image-search results, describes Flier’s vibe differently: “Mercedes salesman.” I followed Flier’s rhythmic hand gestures in court like a mesmerized Romanov. I recited his favorite cross-examination phrases for my husband David, never the jealous type. “With respect to,” I’d say, moving my loosely cupped hands back and forth on different planes near my naval. “Is that a fair statement?” I’d ask, mimicking Flier’s brisk, nasal “a.” “Do you have an independent recollection,” I’d say, tapping imaginary, folded glasses midair as if smacking the accented syllables like whack-a-moles.
At 11:53 a.m. on March 31, 2015, I received a text from Dad. “I just dropped off the keys to the house…and said a prayer one last time on behalf of the family,” it read. The house in question was the first concrete thing he’d bought in America way back in 1979, a modest, nondescript one-story suburban starter home we’d moved out of some 26 years and three months earlier, in the winter of 1989. He’d hung onto it, tending to it, landlording it, in hopes of one day gifting it to either me, my sister, or brother. This would not come to pass.
When I saw his text, relief washed over me. After a tortured year of preparing to put it on the market he’d actually gone and finally put it on the damn market. Of course, it wasn’t just that one year of re-carpeting, repairing faucets, replacing bathroom tiles, fighting with the homeowners’ association over loose gutters and paint colors. It was years of Saturday afternoons spent fixing leaky pipes, broken tiles, fritzing-out air conditioners, or trying, failing, and calling in a contractor, who often seemed to be a brown guy named Jim Patel.
French’s intense interest in identity and self-deception might make this a slow-building book for some. But if you read her as carefully as you should, it’s a seductively detailed start in which every bit of dailiness is made to matter.
Familiar Things is a cautionary tale, both a mirror and a portent for our own world. Yet, though it is a tragic tale, it is also a defiantly optimistic one. At every turn, the characters manifest remarkable adaptability and spiritual fortitude. Despite the filth and grime to which they have been relegated, they build a life and a culture that, though by no means utopic, nevertheless serves as a testament to human perseverance and the undeterrable growth of new cultural shoots. Though they subsist in a dirty, rotten world, swaddled in clouds of flies and a “vile combination of every bad odour in the world,” the inhabitants of Flower Island live one day at a time, adapting, helping one another, and finding those familiar things that make life worth living — in short: building a new world out of the rotten husks of the old.
But False Calm remains beautiful. It's worth reading as a collection of impressions, an act of witness, and a tribute to the lives Cristoff encounters. Where it falters as a book, it still succeeds as a record. Its message is that of graffiti, or gravestones, or monuments. I was here, it says. We are here. These towns are still here. After a writer admits her lack of control, there's not much else for her to say.