Chinese-Americans — both native-born and immigrant — played a huge part in the settling of the American West, a fact that has too rarely been the subject of fiction. How Much of These Hills Is Gold, a debut novel by C Pam Zhang, is a tough-minded, skillful and powerful corrective to that omission. She dismantles the myth of the American West, or, rather, builds it up by adding faces and stories that have often been missing from the picture ... Zhang’s sweeping descriptions of the West put me in mind of the Steinbeck; she captures well its aridness and wild beauty, as well as what it costs those who traverse the barren land ... Don’t get me wrong: Zhang’s voice and story are wholly her own. How Much of These Hills Is Gold is an arresting, beautiful novel that in no way directly mines another. But by invoking these tropes, she reimagines them for thousands of forgotten Americans of different races and gender orientations; her American West is no longer populated only by the all-white, predominantly male cast of characters who, we’ve been told, created it ... an aching book, full of myths of Zhang’s making as well as joys, as well as sorrows. It’s violent and surprising and musical. Like Lucy and Sam, the novel wanders down byways and takes detours and chances. By journey’s end, you’re enriched and enlightened by the lives you have witnessed.
Sure to be the boldest debut of the year ... C Pam Zhang grapples with the legend of the wild west and mines brilliant new gems from a well-worn setting ... The story is heavy with layers of trauma ... On the one hand, the novel is in close touch with the entire tradition of wild west mythology and film and many of its surface details and set dressing are highly familiar ... At the same time, the story feels completely original, flushed through with new and unexpected perspectives. Through Zhang’s deep attention, the classic western is given a rich new shading as race, gender, sexual identity, poverty and pubescence come into play. The novel is thick with detail, metaphor and oblique allusion ... at its core is a chilling sense of the utter loneliness and isolation felt by Lucy and Sam.
... [a] thoroughly engrossing saga ... Deceptively, How Much of These Hills Is Gold starts out slow. In the first section of four, Zhang lays the skeleton groundwork for the rest of the book while still keeping most of the salient details close to the vest ... But any misgivings about this book’s promise immediately evaporate in section two. Here and continuing on throughout the rest of the book, the transformation from run-of-the-mill Great American West adventure tale into a fully immersive epic drama packed with narrative riches and exquisitely crafted prose is so complete that it’s easy to chalk up the first few chapters to protracted scene-setting. Like any intuitive storyteller, Zhang exposes the truth about her characters by setting up well-worn, surface-level stereotypes and poking holes in them one by one ... On a basic level, How Much of These Hills Is Gold succeeds as a riveting account of one family’s struggle to make ends meet in the American West ... But the novel is also a much-needed homage to the untold history of American immigrants, one in which Zhang discards the tired retelling of our white forefathers’ journey to discover and conquer great new lands, in favor of giving a voice to the 'honest folks' of color who were enslaved, robbed, raped or murdered in the process ... Zhang captures not only the mesmeric beauty and storied history of America’s sacred landscape, but also the harsh sacrifices countless people were forced to make in hopes of laying claim to its bounty.
Zhang plainly cherishes the genre’s broad themes. Everything else that defines the Western gets run through a shredder ... Her prose at its best can be heart-stoppingly lyrical ... But Zhang’s microscopic attention to every line means many of them feel labored over. Sentences groan with metaphor or forced portentousness. Each chapter has a raw, elemental title...But instead of giving the story an earthy simplicity, the symbolism just as often burdens the storytelling ... The novel’s flaws are consistently a function of Zhang’s ambition, though – she’s confidently determined to make something new of the Western. Which is fitting, because her two memorable lead characters are trying to make themselves new as well.
... Outstanding ... Zhang does more than just push against the cowboy narrative: She shoves it clear out of the way ... At once subversive and searching ... This is not a writer who flinches from the grotesque ... the novel shows how the stories we tell ourselves and others are often incomplete — and that goes double for the stories we tell about other people.
Despite the historical setting, the striking familiarity of Lucy and Sam’s narrative and the world we live in suggests that, despite the likely passage of 160 years, little has changed in the experience of racism as an Asian American ... The novel’s first part follows Sam and Lucy’s journey east; evocative and sharply honed, the prose can occasionally get mired in its lyricism. Zhang’s sentences are deliberately hewn to the point of fracture, the diction dry as the scorched landscape the siblings traverse, conjuring up rough gems embedded in earth. But as the two flee through the desert seeking sheer survival, Zhang deftly integrates their upbringing through a series of flashbacks ... As the novel progresses so, too, does the prose: The sentences begin to feel less arid as the story dives back into the past ... The book’s fantastical refiguring allows for some moments of narrative poignancy, particularly in dreamlike images like the repeated motif of a stalking tiger’s paw prints, which make literal the cultural and inherited trauma and perhaps even hope that link parent and child. In the book’s most magical and breathtakingly beautiful section, told from the point of view of their father’s ghost, we learn how Ba’s relationship with their mother came to be and the sacrifices it required from them and their community ... When Sam suddenly returns from years spent adventuring...Zhang’s lyrical prose is now activated again but at a brisk, thrilling clip.
... a brilliant re-envisioning of the western ... Zhang’s language isn’t just gorgeous, it’s revolutionary. She creates her own vernacular, a combination of American folk tales and cowboy poets and Mandarin Chinese ... At turns beautiful and brutal, Zhang’s debut is a stunner ... a visionary addition to American literature.
... the setting sprawls, alternating between wonder and fear of the unknown in crackling, atmospheric prose ... Despite some characteristics endemic to Wild West narratives, the world of How Much Of These Hills Is Gold feels wholly original, and Zhang imbues its wide expanse with magical realism ... the fourth and final section feels like an entirely different novel. In the last 30 or so pages, much of the momentum is lost, with characters acting from motivations that don’t comport with what we’ve come to understand about them. The ending is also punishing in a way that feels less poetic than ham-fisted—like a story loop in HBO’s Westworld that’s bound to end in tragedy for the character, despite best intentions ... Notwithstanding the disappointing conclusion, How Much Of These Hills Is Gold is a thrilling and epic debut that elides stereotypes associated with Chinese or Western narratives and which forges its own mythology. Lucy and Sam’s world in the wilderness feels entirely lived in and fully imagined, and reflections on home, gender and sexual identity, and familial duty parallel strong stylistic choices that, even if the ending doesn’t, do genuinely pay off.
... [an] action-packed...standout debut ... Unfolding in a carefully structured, nonlinear fashion, the novel repeatedly questions what makes a home a home and what makes a family a family ... Zhang’s sparse prose style may initially take some getting used to, but both language and plot remain clearly focused. Daringly original, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is gritty and frequently gruesome, yet at times magical and ethereal ... Zhang’s laser-sharp reexamination of America’s myth-laden past is likely to help bring clarity to many issues that continue to challenge us all.
... [a] triking tinderbox of a debut ... Zhang challenges many narratives of nonbelonging ... This is a novel that explores the messiness of diaspora, of longing for a home that you’ve never lived in, of understanding that America doesn’t belong to anyone except its indigenous peoples, and the dream of American gold and possibility is written in the blood of native genocide and erasure ... This is a story of becoming, and it’s a messy one, the beauty and breadth of it as inextricable from unimaginable hunger and threat as the landscape and history of the West itself. Zhang’s prose is bite-sharp and sun-bright, ravenous with lean, thundering adventure and parched, desperate longing ... asks and asks, wants and wants, seeks and fights, acquiesces and burns with rage. This is a powerful, masterful innovation of a novel. Of the violence of white Western imperialism, how it brutalizes this land and the nonwhite peoples within it and who came to it, how it continues to rewrite that history. Of birthright and burial, of storytelling and body. Of queer, unruly gender and desire, of diaspora and nonbelonging. Zhang’s incisive, poetic writing haunts the page, fervent and vicious and true.
... stunning ... Zhang goes a step further, giving their narrative a grandness and grit that has, so often, only been applied to white western frontiersmen ... Moments like this are a heady pause in the middle of an expedition that evokes so many elements of the western canon. Zhang easily inhabits some conventions of the genre, writing with poetic toughness about relentless bad luck and the visceral realities of survival. But How Much of These Hills Is Gold also rests on a foundation of the Chinese-American experience that’s so rarely represented in fiction about the West (or anywhere in American literature) ... a long-overdue treatment of the American West, since narratives about the frontier have had the tendency to exclude many of those who helped build it.
... a haunting tale of family, home, and belonging ... Somewhat disconcertingly, Zhang interpolates what she calls ''pidgin Mandarin'—rendered in an anachronistic 20th-century pinyin—into the dialogue. If Lucy, Sam and Ma spoke Mandarin, they would be most unusual, since most of the 19th-century immigrants hailed from southern China and spoke, more than anything else, Cantonese. This matters—especially to the Cantonese, especially now ... It’s nonetheless a heartbreaking story, and a very necessary one that’s long overdue.
Zhang brings to life the vast, often-omitted cruelties of westward expansion ... Zhang’s choices in language show how white settlers attempt to demean and erase Lucy and Sam’s existence in real time ... Zhang’s lyricism and eye for narrative structure are superb in equal measure. The storytelling is coiled and confident, it excels in its mixed chronology and echoes to the past. Throughout, the prose has a prospector’s aesthetic. The sentences have been sifted through so that only the necessary elements remain, the glimmering bits that sparkle in the sun. Clouds, hills, gold, salt, blood, wind, home, these words are turned over and examined with such care that they increase in value over time ... The syntax too varies as much as gold formations, parceled out in terse flakes and flowing veins, a larger abundance of dazzling nuggets than any landscape could ever be expected to provide ... The landscape is described in broad features so that the West feels expansive and endless, but Zhang writes with a level of specificity that gives the elements a distinct geography ... a gorgeous novel that gives its characters room to learn, mourn, fight, and reinvent themselves. But it also reveals the flaws and false revisions in the American mythos, the ways we have never fully overcome the brutalities on which this country was built, and how much was lost, destroyed, and stolen in the pursuit of profit along the way.
... [a] unique, discomforting reimagining of the American West adventure ... the sense that out there it’s dangerous, that you can’t trust other people lest they kill you, is surely one that will chime with many readers ... We’re used to hearing about the gold rush tales of rapacious 49ers, swaggering cowboys and displaced Native Americans, but we’ve heard almost nothing of the Chinese-Americans who played a huge part in settling the West...Zhang, who was born in China but spent much of her life in the US, has performed an admirable job in redressing the balance ... a story that combines brutal beauty and dreamlike horror ... This is not exactly a fun-filled novel — but it is memorable...It is a self-consciously important book about loneliness, belonging and the ferocious delusion of the American Dream. The story is conveyed in a spare, lyrical prose with sharp, pronounced imagery. Metaphors about salt, wood, bones and hills abound. There are times when the words are so swollen that they almost suffocate, rather than serve, the story and characters. But the language is also what kindles the warmth in a book of little cheer.
Zhang's style can be densely, airlessly lovely. Self-conscious lyricism fills the page like all that California dust, sometimes making it hard to breathe ... The novel also depends so heavily on foreshadowing that it feels like we might be in a de Chirico painting. For Zhang's characters, any good thing—a baby, a new friend, sudden money—spells disaster, a feature which drains suspense and makes it impossible to sustain any hope for them. To read this novel the way it wants to be read—earnestly, wholeheartedly—would be to be in a perpetual state of longing and disappointment ... it's hard not to resent that emotional manipulation. But Zhang also unspools sophisticated ideas about land, ownership, rootedness, and history.
This fascinating historical novel is a fever-dream trek from one worked-out California gold field to another while Ms. Zhang deftly unspools the family’s past ... This book grabbed me on many levels – Ms. Zhang’s puzzle-box adventure and her jagged, yet lyrical prose, while Lucy and Sam’s trek struck bright echoes from my own travels in arid gold country. The love-anger relationship between sisters and parents will ring clearly with anyone who ever had a fraught relationship with a family member. I can’t recommend How Much of These Hills Is Gold more highly.
It is in these moments of revelation and in the small details of the story that Zhang shows the deftness of her craft ... a treasure-trove of questions that devastate even as they beckon readers on.
... vibrant and descriptive ... Zhang has quietly peopled it with characters: hardworking, often short lived, lazy, kind, careless and parasitical all totally believable. She has created a secure sense of time as well, pulling no punches about what went on in the past but casually recognising people’s constraints and weaknesses that led to their choices and actions ... Zhang is a brilliant story teller for all these reasons. The only criticism one might make (being pernickety) is that to unravel the tale of the girls’ parents, when the children were orphaned so young, the achievements and understandings of the girls are perhaps greater than likely – so this aspect requires a suspension of disbelief – although young orphaned children being left vulnerable and open to abuse was real. But do not let that put you off from reading this first rate novel. Emigration to new lands and cultures, having to cope with difference, hostility and harsh finances; watching children grow with different experiences, values and understanding of home are not just 'historical' issues. What do family, community, respect and decency really mean? The images and questions of this tale continue to haunt.
... her gorgeously written novel deserves praise not only for its artistry but also for its attempt to fill a shameful gap: the scarcity of Chinese characters in the literature and history of the American West ... Yet Zhang’s novel is much more than a long-overdue corrective; it’s an absorbing, richly imagined account of one Chinese family scrabbling to survive the violence and racism that prevailed in the California gold fields and in the gangs that built the transcontinental railroad. How Much of These Hills Is Gold not only overdue but also vital and timely ... I’m hoping for many more novels like How Much of These Hills Is Gold : novels that breathe life into people who have gone unseen too long.
This riveting novel is full of myth and also rooted in a raw, harsh landscape. Children bear the burden of tradition, but family rituals also provide solace and even freedom. The capable flintiness of Lucy and Sam enables their physical survival, but all the toughness in the world won’t numb their wrenching discovery about their own mother’s sacrifices and selfishness. Only their love for each other will help make a place for them in a changing world.
Zhang’s novel is not quite as thematically groundbreaking as its publicity would have it...is, however, novel in the way it foregrounds Chinese women in the Old West ... Zhang is adept at casting the structural modes of power in ordinary observations ... a pessimistic work, given the historical experience of Chinese migrants in the period in question. Zhang’s well-calibrated but unfussy prose is reminiscent of both Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison...But there is also a mystical tenor that cuts through the flinty realism, with a tiger, one of the most redoubtable animals of the Chinese zodiac, prowling throughout, an avatar of the departed mother, haunting a narrative that has at its heart an unspoken tragedy that ultimately destroys the family ... If Zhang might be accused of endowing her novel with one flaw, it is that the notion of identity is sometimes mediated through language and ideas that are just a bit too contemporary. That said, it’s an anachronism more discursive than material and one that can be forgiven in what is otherwise a fine debut.
... impressive ... filled with gruesome detail ... Remarkably, all four characters are drawn with equal precision, each emerging as fully rounded, with quirks and conflicting desires. The siblings are opposites and the complexity of their relationship is elegantly developed ... This is a family weighed down by secrets; the intrigue of uncovering each new revelation becomes compulsive ... Sweeping in intent, the novel is steeped in the language of folklore and myth: sentences are short and rhythmic; metaphors, similes and allusion abound. Mostly it works. The landscape is captured in its immense harshness, and there are reams of arresting images ... At times, though, the effect can be a little too breathy. How Much of These Hills Is Gold doesn’t wear its themes of oppression and belonging subtly...But bear with it because Zhang’s novel blossoms in the course of its 336 pages into a daring and haunting little epic.
A blend of history and myth, the language of Hills is poetic without becoming pure poetry. Zhang’s words flow and blend into each other, becoming almost a stylistic microcosm of the rolling and tumbling hills ... Zhang calls into question history as objective; rather, she presents history as a series of what we chose to exemplify and what we chose to leave out ... By imagining this beautiful story, Zhang has given us a story that prompts us to ask these difficult questions and to seek spaces for ourselves.
... oddly mesmerising ... a debate about identity and immigrants, history and home, aloneness and alienation, one which sometimes slows down an otherwise gripping story ... Zhang is a gifted magician. She has appropriated a sliver of the Old West, but with a twist ... Zhang, who is only 30 years old and used to work for a tech start-up, reveals quite grand ambitions for this first novel. Her Chinese immigrants do not work in the goldfields or on the railroad, as thousands did, but they do become heroes in their own story ... The children's initial journey in search of a burial site possesses an eerie, even surreal edge. When Zhang reverts to flashbacks of the Chinese family's life together, her tale becomes more prosaic, now and then, and a little leaden ... Throughout, Zhang reveals a remarkable gift for an arresting, idiosyncratic phrase. Many are good enough to stop a reader in her tracks, taking a moment to ponder and wonder ... Her themes are tugged together towards the end, in a brave and bold way which underlines a considerable talent. Readers should not just enjoy this book but wait expectantly for the next.
On the whole, Zhang seems less intent on contributing to the myth of the American West than on moralizing ... Zhang culls her prose to lean iterations of poetics and scene. Beauty exists where it can be found, intimate and stark. With little more than blocking and dialogue, Zhang deftly captures the tensions of adolescence and of Lucy and Sam’s relationship. There is also justice in Zhang’s sparse writing; in her retelling, we find a reclamation of the power to give and take. It felt right that Zhang would write of a country marred by Manifest Destiny, saving her eloquence for history’s constants: grief, pain, guilt, and despair ... But Zhang’s editorial hand can be overly ambitious. At times I felt pinched, outside the narrative, and hungry ... It wasn’t sensory detail I craved. Such glimpses of the quotidian provide much-needed contrast to passages in which every word, every sentence, functions as metaphor, symbolism, or foreshadowing. So much of Lucy’s conviction in the narrative-present is absolute, making some characters’ behavior startling, rather than realistic. By contrast, Part Three is suffused with doubt and absolutely breathes. Zhang makes space for the narrator’s and readers’ humanity to coexist. Although the entire novel is provoking, Part Three is resonant and a pleasure to reread ... Ultimately, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a poignant reminder of those the West erased and also a reminder that for millions of immigrants, migrants, and their children, the search for self and home continues to this day. Zhang challenges her characters and her readers to conceptualize a want—or a belonging—that comes with no cost to someone or something else.
... gorgeous ... [Zhang] She creates her own mythology as she weaves her tale, all while shedding light on a whitewashed portion of history ... a vast and intriguing land to spend time in, and within it she tells a powerful, intimate story ... The story is compelling, beautifully written and at times propulsively plotted, and through it Zhang examines a number of themes, from gender identity to sexuality to abuse to racism and beyond. But these themes are all true to the exciting story at the novel’s center, which twists and punches while crackling with literary language. She uses foreshadowing to build tension and uses creative and magical ways to bring Ba and Ma’s story into play ... s stumble in the night. Many interactions are marked by glances and glares, pinches and presses rather than exclamations or more overt violence. But howls do come, as does the violence, and it’s all the more effective given the quiet nature of other passages ... Zhang takes a genre that has been stuck in its ways since the beginning, breaks it wide open and revels in it. There are shades of The Grapes of Wrath here, as well as Lonesome Dove and True Grit. These knowing homages make How Much of These Hills Is Gold all the more impressive, because Zhang is taking on the idols and ideals of the masculine western right in their own backyard. And she wins; there is more to be found in these Hills than those other works, and there is so much fun to be had in the finding.
Though this is a literary novel, Zhang’s choice not to anchor the narrative in specific dates and places creates a quality of a dreamy myth-telling, almost a fantasy fairy tale of two children lost in a strange and wild land. The reader gets lost along with the children amid the unknown and unknowable. We are both excited and disorientated by wandering ... For readers who understand some Mandarin, and who understand some of the history of Chinese immigration, the use of mixed language and the fluid historical placement disorientates and unsettles in an empathic way. (For example, the Mandarin has no tone markers and uses pinyin Romanization instead of Chinese characters, so the meaning has to be extracted through context, mirroring the experience of those who don’t have full fluency in their parents’ language.) The narrative feels incomplete, half-untold. What is left unsaid, whether in Mandarin or in the descriptions of time and place, speaks as loud as what is on the page. This mirrors Lucy and Sam’s experience, of piecing together meaning from scattered bits of words and memories.
... mesmerizing ... Zhang reveals as much through deliberate elision as meticulous storytelling ... Zhang, just 29, writes with precocious assurance as she confronts the inseparable connections between lies, liars, and secrets; the barriers of language; the impossible price of family bonds, and the everlasting longing to find home.
This moving tale of family, gold, and freedom rings with a truth that defies rosy preconceptions. The description of human and environmental degradation is balanced by shining characters who persevere greatly. Highly recommended.
Zhang’s extraordinary debut, a beautifully rendered family saga, centers on a pair of siblings, Lucy, 12, and Sam, 11, who are left orphaned in the wake of the American gold rush ... Gorgeously written and fearlessly imagined, Zhang’s awe-inspiring novel introduces two indelible characters whose odyssey is as good as the gold they seek.
That there is a place where anyone can strike it rich or, failing that, at least live free is one of the stories Americans love to tell ourselves. Zhang plays with this duality in her brutally lyrical debut ... Aside from fictions—some fanciful inventions, some hateful lies—about Native Americans, we don’t hear much about the experiences of people of color and immigrants in shaping the West. Zhang asks readers to acknowledge a legacy we have been taught to ignore by creating a new and spellbinding mythology of her own. Aesthetically arresting and a vital contribution to America’s conversation about itself.
