Review of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream

By Jonathan Yardley

John Derbyshire, who is neither Chinese nor American, has written a novel about a Chinese immigrant in America that fairly takes the breath away.   Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream is an absolute delight, a small but rich book in which every note is struck exactly right, a book one reads mesmerized, so hypnotic is the wry, self-effacing yet insistent voice in which it is narrated.  It is the best first novel to come my way since William Boyd's A Good Man in Africa; indeed it is so good that it shows no signs of being a first novel.

As his name would lead one to expect, Derbyshire is English.  He "has travelled widely in East Asia," according to his publisher, and now lives in New York State.  He has worked at teaching, journalism and computer programming, none of which would seem likely to train him to write prose as lovely as that with which every page of this novel is graced.  But write it is what he has done, and I am going to do everything within my limited powers of persuasion to talk you into reading it.

The novel's premise is, to put it mildly, unpromising.   A smart and moderately ambitious man named Chai makes a difficult passage from China to Hong Kong (he swims four perilous miles) to New York, where he works at a bank.   He is now nearly 50 years old and lives in a suburb with his much younger wife, Ding, their daughter, Hetty, and their dog, Jip.  His gratitude at being in America is boundless; to him it is "the Peach Blossom Country, a place in which anyone could have a good life, free of officials, hungers and movements."  He is a happy, if not outright smug, fellow.

"Teacher Ouyang used to say:  If you're not strong at twenty, handsome at thirty, rich at forty and wise at fifty, then you will never be strong, or handsome, or rich, or wise.  Well, I have never been rich, and I suppose I never shall be.  The others worked out all right, though, so I will not complain.  Now, coming toward fifty, I have even got some wisdom at last, thanks to President Coolidge.  Just a little -- not enough to be a teacher myself.  But enough to live my life the right way -- and what else is wisdom for?"

He is a methodical man who goes about everything in a purposeful way, whether it be the Scrabble games he plays against Ding or the "old dead men", in Ding's words, with whom he becomes obsessed.  Until recently his fixation had been on Dr. Samuel Johnson, but now he has altered course and focused -- "Let me tell you, when I have these enthusiasms, I stop at nothing" -- on Calvin Coolidge, "the most single-minded and consistent of all modern Presidents, superintendent of the Last Arcadia."

To Chai, Coolidge is the embodiment of all he finds good about America, and "the more I learned of Mr. Coolidge, the more I loved the man."  To Ding one night at dinner he says: "The man was a Confucian.   Human beings naturally good.  Social harmony through the moral perfection of self.  Serve the people.  Not much need for laws if the leaders give a good example."  To this apostate Red Guard who had decided that his cohorts "were just a bunch of gangsters," Coolidge is "not a politician, but a moralist," and he finds this hugely attractive.

Chai's Coolidge researches are conducted against the backdrop of an unsettled private life.  His work goes well and his marriage to Ding is happy -- "I am glad I married so late.  My first wife is my Second Wife.   This is very satisfactory.  I have all the advantage of a Second Wife, without alimony or visitation problems." -- but an alluring ghost from his past has reappeared.  Her name is Selina, and many years ago in Hong Kong they had an affair of surpassing ardor that ended when she left for the United States and the Chinese immigrant, Yoy, to whom she was affianced.  Now she is married and living in Boston; Chai is determined "to see her, to see her, to close the circle, to find out."

Afflicted from out of the blue by the "pestilence" of love, Chai finds himself "wondering whether perhaps I had lost my reason, to be pursuing a plump, fractious ghost from my past, when my present and future were so comfortable and assured," yet he cannot help himself.  He is determined to have Selina once again; but Ding gets wind of this yearning and, while never letting on to Chai that she knows, sets up a line of defense that is wonderfully ingenious and, in its effectiveness, absolutely dazzling.  Even though the reader can spot what is coming, it is brought off with such aplomb and panache that nothing except delight is forthcoming.  Certainly Coolidge would approve; and certainly, for that matter, no one who reads this novel will ever again think of Calvin Coolidge in quite the same way, itslef no mean accomplishment on John Derbyshire's part.

As for this novel to which that much misunderstood president has lent his presence, it is at once a lovely entertainment and a small work of art.  It occupies a territory somewhere between the real and the fantastic without ever seeming uncomfortable or improbable; its scenes in Hong Kong, its divagations on Coolidge and his import, its account of Chai's marriage and his straying therefrom are all equally believable.  By no means least important, it gives new and valuable meaning to its epigraph, taken from John Donne, "To enter in these bonds, is to be free..."

Unlike most contemporary fiction, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream gives no evidence of the assembly line or the confessional; it is sui generis.  I took it up with some apprehension, since both its title and its situation struck me as unpromising, but I put it down with the deepest regret that it had come to an end.  In more than three decades of professional book reviewing I have found perhaps a half dozen books that came out of the unknown and gave me surprise and pleasure beyond measure.  Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream most emphatically is one of these.