...a strange, intense novel from Ha Jin about the glories and limits of the freedom of the press ... one of the most unsettling books about the moral dimensions of modern journalism ... Aside from a delicious satire of book publicity — an industry so unhitched from reality that it’s hard to parody its exaggerations — The Boat Rocker also dramatizes the vast shadow world of Internet news.
At once hilarious and sobering ... shows what happens when truthful stories hit the wall of Chinese politics, and it’s not pretty. At the same time, in crafting a memorable hero and a narrative that is both entertaining and thought-provoking, he affirms the value of fiction itself as not simply a source of profit, but a powerful vehicle for the truths of our times.
As much a polemic as a work of fiction, The Boat Rocker describes an Orwellian world in which a single questionable judgment, coupled with a stubborn adherence to principle, exposes Danlin to life-shaking consequences ... Written in Ha Jin's typically plain-spoken style, The Boat Rocker is not one of his finest works. Its plot turns seem both unlikely and cynical, and its dialogue can be stiffly political. But the author's own genuine anger at hypocrisy ultimately renders the title character, and his plight, sympathetic.
I imagine the number of novels that employ sardonic commentary regarding the exploitation of 9/11 by authors and political entities is a very short list, if not nonexistent. Jin pulls no punches ... The two institutions on trial in the novel are writing as a vocation, and the Chinese government ... Jin’s criticism of modern-day Communist China is stunning, easily the best part of an already well-crafted novel.
The humor in The Boat Rocker largely stems from Feng’s gleeful mocking of the grandiose claims of Yan and various party hacks, not least through his quoting of purple passages from the manuscript ... The Boat Rocker is no polemic masquerading as a novel. Yes, Jin wants us to root for Feng, but the novel includes nuanced debates on loyalty and identity, not just anti-Communist tirades. And the characters are multidimensional. This is true, most crucially, for Jin’s boat-rocking narrator.
Throughout The Boat Rocker, Jin’s prose will strike the reader as uninspired and rather workmanlike. The odd humorous flourish proves delightful, and prompts one to entertain notions of a largely dormant literary sensibility on the author’s part ... however, The Boat Rocker emerges as convincing as well as timely.
Set in New York, Ha Jin’s new novel, The Boat Rocker, takes place 'a week before the fourth anniversary of 9/11.' Much of the novel’s power derives from the uncanny parallels between the issues faced by its central figure, a truth-seeking online journalist in the era of Hu Jintao and George W Bush, and all of us, in our Trumpian moment, as we struggle with its penchant for 'alternative facts' ... China and its political system figure prominently in his writing, often cast in a dynamic tension with the US ...is hard to miss the irony that 'truth' today is potentially as compromised and blurred in the US now as Ha Jin would have us believe it has been for a long time in China ... Thought-provoking and fast-paced, The Boat Rocker is a perfect read for this anxious winter of discontent.
...the narrative framework is fertile ground for Jin’s brilliant and nuanced political and social observations ... These are cogent, incisive impressions, and it feels like a miracle — and a splendid irony — that an immigrant writer can fashion a novel with such quintessentially American themes from the front lines of the Chinese diaspora.
Unfortunately, Ha Jin seems less interested in writing a novel than a screed taking aim at the various permutations of Chinese censorship ... Danlin’s quest — often less heroic than priggishly self-righteous — results in some of the most wooden, ideologically charged dialogue I’ve read in a long time ... Recollecting infinitely better Ha Jin novels, this poorly constructed and executed book induces such nostalgia in me.
Where The Boat Rocker fails is in delivering any sense of narrative tension. Long-time readers of Jin know better than to expect a potboiler of political suspense that is neatly tied up with a bow. At the same time, it’s hard not to wish Jin had done a little bit more with the possibilities: distrust between the countries, between the man and woman, between publisher and author. When the end result is a book that feels more like the fictional Love and Death in September than a Ha Jin novel, it feels like a lost opportunity.
