RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle... billed as a story of father and son, and it is exactly that — though not in the way that contemporary Western readers might expect. There is little excavation of Ai’s emotional relationship with his father, and no oedipal psychodrama, thank God. Instead, the reader gets a clear-eyed account of two artists working against convention, buffeted by the whims of absurdist politics ... Much of the beginning of this book reads like a history. Much of the end, following the author’s growing artistic renown, reads more like a narrative retrospective than memoir. Even when the boy Ai is present, watching his exiled father shatter frozen turds with a shovel, his prose style is documentary. When occasional meditations on memory, freedom and individualism appear, they too are stated like fact ... Translated into even-toned, straightforward English by Allan Barr, this style echoes the artist’s practice of prolific documentation ... Sometimes, the Western reader in me did crave a pinch more vulnerability. There are few actual declarations of love in this book, little interpersonal drama (even Wang Fen, Ai Lao’s mother, is barely discussed beyond her role as mother), none of the confessional intimacy we have come to expect from memoir. Ai himself remains so unflappable in his convictions that his consistency can become almost banal ... I say this in admiration. If the memoir is sometimes boring, it is boring like a repeated image of Marilyn Monroe, or a can of Campbell’s soup, is boring. Young Ai, in the memoir’s spirited middle, found inspiration in Andy Warhol’s love of \'boring things,\' and the idea of the \'ready-made\' expressed by Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. In the most illuminating moments of reflection, Ai confronts political repression — the ultimate, exhausting banality of censorship, ubiquitous surveillance and interminable interrogations — as a sort of \'ready-made\' reality against which his artwork reacts: \'For me, inspiration comes from resistance,\' he writes. \'Having a real — and powerful — adversary was my good fortune\'.
Mahesh Rao
MixedThe San Francisco Chronicle... [an] ably observed comedy of manners ... the Emma comparison may be more true to the author’s intentions and to the novel’s structure ... a richly imagined world ... Sometimes, Polite Society can be too polite. While there is much exciting action in this book — affairs, lies, secrets buried in death — most of it happens offstage. What the reader gets instead is the gossip of the action, overheard in many a glittering drawing room. Rao’s gift is his ability to depict the elevated stakes of small gestures and etiquette, but this comes at a cost: We lose a sense of larger stakes. Slights seem recoverable, ignorance forgivable. Even when financial ruin is on the horizon, we trust that everyone will probably be fine ... Ironically, Rao’s writing shines brightest when his characters leave the glittering world ... While Austen’s Emma gives this book an even structure and sure pacing, events meaningful and fraught enough to shoulder an entire novel become subservient to a larger, predetermined plot ... Rao also writes with knowing insight on the hearts of the aspiring rich. His depictions of Ania’s upwardly mobile friend Dimple and her relatively humble life are more tender and sweet than mocking.
