Ha Jin, who came to the United States to study in 1985 and remained here after the Tiananmen Square massacre, won the National Book Award and great praise for his previous book, Waiting. Now comes The Crazed (Pantheon, 352 pages, $24), his tale about a literature professor at a provincial Chinese university who after suffering a stroke lets loose bitter rants about his life under the Communist regime.
Set in 1989, The Crazed is partly a reckoning with the massacre, with the gathering protests in Beijing serving as the backdrop to Professor Yang's ravings. But the book's focus is on discovering what is behind the professor's crazed monologues, which are witnessed by the narrator, his student and son-in-law-to-be Jian Wan, on visits to Yang's musty hospital room.
Oddly, this unraveling of the professor's past lacks mystery. His banal complaints center on having been undervalued as a scholar and victimized by campus politics, of being just a "piece of meat on a chopping board." His ramblings are unrealistically coherent, the clues they offer about his life so obvious that Jian makes sense of them on the spot. Equally spontaneous are the epiphanies Jian experiences on hearing the rants. Ha Jin is known for his unreflective characters, but Jian comes off simply as naive and capricious.
What insights the book offers into Tiananmen-era China are marred by awkward style. Ha Jin, who writes in English, struggles with idiom: at one point, Jian says of the Communist leaders, "I hope the old fogies won't set the army on the students" -- absurdly mild phrasing for so impassioned a subject.
Patricia Henley's second novel, In the River Sweet (Pantheon, 304 pages, $24), also revolves around the revelations of a past in modern East Asia, with better results. Here, the reader is let in on the truth from the start and the drama lies in whether it will be disclosed to everyone else.
Ruth Anne Bond, a 50-year-old Midwesterner, is still wrestling with the secret she's carried for three decades -- that, while living in Saigon during the Vietnam War, she had an affair with a blind Vietnamese teen-ager and gave birth to a boy whom she turned over to her lover's mother. The question of whether to unburden herself becomes more pressing when she is contacted by the now-grown son, who has moved to America with his father.
Ruth Anne yearns to reconnect with her Saigon years, but doing so would mean confessing her betrayal to her American husband, a Vietnam War veteran. Not only is she risking the future with the husband she loves, Ruth Anne is "in danger of losing her past" with him if her affair becomes a part of it.
The subtlety in Henley's handling of Vietnam is absent in the book's subplot about the travails of Ruth Anne's lesbian daughter. And the author's rich descriptions, effective in the Saigon scenes, can seem precious when applied to a Midwest where "songbirds flittered in aural calligraphy." But gauzy touches can't obscure the book's moral drama.
Two new novels dispense with the niceties of narrative flashbacks and instead employ the most direct means of plumbing the past: time travel. In the surrealist White Apples (Tor, 304 pages, $24.95), Jonathan Carroll tells the story of Vincent Ettrich, an amiable philanderer who is brought back from the dead. At first, Ettrich doesn't realize that he is walking dead; only later does he learn that he has been restored to life by his dearest lover to watch over their unborn child, who is ordained to save the world.
Ettrich's reincarnation is initially entertaining. Eventually, though, his mysterious mission spins into a confused web of omens, divine interventions and even possessed zoo animals. It is fare that Carroll's loyal fans have come to expect, but for the uninitiated, it may be too much.
An injection of the bizarre would be welcome in another tale of time travel, Gregg Easterbrook's second novel The Here and Now (Thomas Dunne, 256 pages, $23.95). Corporate lawyer Carter Morris is about to settle a fraudulent class-action lawsuit that will bring him millions when he starts fretting about his betrayal of the values he espoused as a dashing '60s radical. Soon he's being transported, Back to the Future-style, to various points in his past in his attempt to understand where he went wrong.
It's a well-meaning undertaking, but crippled by a painfully stereotyped rendering of post-World War II America. The glimpses of Carter's past are right out of the baby boom documentary: there he is cowering in a '50s school fallout drill, there he is handing out daffodils at an '60s anti-war rally, there he is selling out and noting that "now the kind of thing people turned out to protest were auto insurance rates." The lone affecting chapter in Carter's past is his stint as an orderly at a veterans' hospital; otherwise, his life is so cliched that it's hard to care if he gets it back together.
A much more imaginative quest for personal identity in the past is undertaken in Twelve Bar Blues (Grove Press, 416 pages, $24), an enjoyable romp by London-based Patrick Neate. This wide-ranging second novel centers on Lick Holden, a hugely talented but unknown cornet player in Jazz Age New Orleans. Holden stands as the link between his African ancestors and his late 20th-century descendants in search of their roots -- a search that takes the reader to Africa, Harlem and Chicago.
The heart of the book, though, is in the honky-tonks of New Orleans, where Lick's rousing tunes enthrall the assembled pimps, prostitutes, and white "good-time boys." Neate's highly figurative language -- which verges on potboiler at times -- shines in describing Lick's playing, how he "blown so loud that his past stuck its fingers in its ears like a grandpops and his future wailed like a baby picking up on a mood." At its best moments, this book shares Lick's verve.
Alec MacGillis covers higher education for The Sun. He majored in English and history at Yale, where he was editor of Zirkus, an undergraduate literary magazine. Before joining The Sun, he wrote for four newspapers in New England and New York, including the Concord Monitor, in New Hampshire, where he covered politics and survived the long winters by extensive reading.