Review_FICTION
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ; JANUARY 26, 2015 142
Yan Lianke’s The Four Books is a biting satire
about Chinese re-education camps during Mao’s
Great Leap Forward (reviewed on this page).
Early Warning
Jane Smiley. Knopf, $26.95 (496p) ISBN 978-
0-307-70032-2
Smiley has a big cast to wrangle in the
second volume of the Last Hundred Years
trilogy, which began with 2014’s Some
Luck, and she starts this entry at the
funeral of Walter, the Iowa farmer and
paterfamilias of volume one. While the
Langdons, scattered across New York,
Chicago, and California, reunite, readers
get a refresher on the family relationships.
Covering 1953 to 1986 at a clip of one
year per chapter, the focus here is the Cold
War and its fallout. This material occasionally feels like the greatest hits of the
post-WWII era, with Langdons brushing
up against a Kennedy assassination,
Jonestown, and Vietnam. And since the
post-war baby boom means cousins by the
dozens, the cast of characters isn’t as vivid
and particular as it was in the knock-out
first volume. Still, Smiley keeps you
reading; as a writer she is less concerned
about individual characters, but still as
deft as ever at conveying the ways in
which a family develops: some stories carrying on, while others fall away. This isn’t
a series you can start in the middle, so
pick up Some Luck , ride out the Depression
and WWII with Walter, Rosanna, and
Frank, then come back to the atom-and-adultery-haunted volume two. (May)
Soil
Jamie Kornegay. Simon & Schuster, $26
(368p) ISBN 978-1-4767-5081-1
Rural Mississippi is the setting for
Kornegay’s beautifully written first novel,
in which James “Jay” Mize invests all his
family’s assets into an experiment in soil-free farming, a concept he believes will
revolutionize the farming industry and
save the world. He convinces his wife,
Sandy, of its promise, and she enthusiastically works to make his project succeed.
However, bad weather and a family
tragedy handicap the endeavor, and Jay
faces bankruptcy. In his dejection, he
begins having paranoid fantasies, which
compel Sandy to regretfully take their
son, Jacob, back to town to live tempo-
rarily with her father. Jay and Sandy
struggle with the breakup of their family
and their difficult circumstances. When
Jay finds a corpse on his land after an
August rain, he believes it came to be
there as part of a conspiracy to ruin him.
As a result, he initiates a chain of tragic
events affecting him, his family, and
others. Penetrating characterizations and
a well-charted story bode well for future
work from this author. Agent: Jim Rutman,
Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)
The Four Books
Yan Lianke, trans. from the Chinese by Carlos
Rojas. Grove, $26 (352p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2312-1
Yan, a finalist for the Man Booker
International Prize, pens a biting satire
about Chinese re-education camps during
the Great Leap Forward that’s as haunting
as it is eye-opening. In this tale, intellec-
tuals and dissidents are sent to a labor
camp, where they promise to perform
impossible tasks in order to gain their
freedom. These intellectuals—“the
Musician,” forced to prostitute herself for
food; her lover, “the Scholar”; “the
Theologian,” who ends up cursing God
for his fate; and “the Author,” commis-
sioned to write reports on the sins of the
others, struggle for survival. Overseeing
all of them is “the Child,” who is as vul-
nerable to the whims of his bureaucratic
superiors as his prisoners are to him. As
the prisoners careen from impossible pro-
duction quotas to slow death by starvation,
the Child eventually offers to sacrifice
himself for their freedom, in a stark parody
of both Maoist ideals and Christian scrip-
ture. Yan has created a complex, epic tale
rife with allusion. He effortlessly moves
from Eastern to Western references, and
even readers without a background in
Chinese history and culture will find his
story fascinating and immersive. The novel
is a stinging indictment of the illogic of
bureaucracy and tyranny, but the literary
structure is tight and the prose incredibly
accessible. Readers will have difficulty
putting this down. Agent: Laura Susjin,
Susjin Agency. (Mar.)
Our Endless Numbered Days
Claire Fuller. Tin House (PGW, dist.), $15.95
trade paper (388p) ISBN 978-1-941040-01-0
Like Emma Donoghue’s Room, Fuller’s
thoroughly immersive debut takes child
kidnapping to a whole new level of dis-
turbing. Eight-year-old Peggy Hillcoat
suspects her father, James, has gone off his
rocker when he builds a fallout shelter in
the basement of their London home to
prepare for the end of the world. But the
ante is upped when, unbeknownst to his
wife, he takes Peggy to an isolated, shabby
log cabin in the Dutch wilderness and tells
her the rest of the world has been destroyed:
“On the other side there is only emptiness,
an awful place that has eaten everything
except our own little kingdom.... [It’s]
called the Great Divide.” For the next nine
years, the pair lives off the land as James
grows increasingly fanatic and Peggy
evolves from a scared and naive girl into a
self-sufficient young woman. When she
eventually returns to civilization alone—
malnourished, with rotten teeth, and
deliriously rambling about someone named
Reuben—doctors’ attempts to figure out
the identity and whereabouts of the mys-
terious mountain man only scratch the
surface of what actually happened to her
and her father. Fuller alternates Peggy’s
time in the forest with chapters that take
place in 1985 after she reunites with her
mother—building an ever-present sense
of foreboding and allowing readers to piece
together well-placed clues. Fuller’s book
has the winning combination of an unreli-
able narrator and a shocking ending. (Mar.)
Fiction
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