Writing, too, involves uncertainty and resolve, and Jin has taken all sorts of risks in his eighth novel. Its American setting is a major departure from his earlier books, which concerned a subject of almost guaranteed fascination for American readers - China under Mao, a culture largely closed to westerners.
"A Free Life" is a big, bulky saga about a Chinese immigrant's first 12 years in the United States. It charts "bookish," hard-working Nan Wu's pursuit of the American Dream, which becomes an odyssey toward self-discovery and self-realization. It is not a page-turner, but is cumulatively engaging as one penetrates deeper into the lives of Jin's sympathetic characters. Among its riskier moves, "A Free Life" ends - like Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago," which it explicitly cites - with an appended collection of rather banal poems attributed to its poet-protagonist.
Jin's new book is more expansive and autobiographical than his beloved 1999 National Book Award winner, "Waiting," or his last two novels, "War Trash" and "The Crazed." In its unbridled scope, it reads at times like a first novel into which the author has poured his heart and soul and everything he has felt and seen while adjusting to "this lonesome, unfathomable, overwhelming land."
Like his protagonist, the author left China in 1985 to earn a PhD at Brandeis and decided to stay in the United States after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, which disillusioned him with his native country. Both author and character move from the Boston area to Atlanta for work - Wu to buy a restaurant, Jin to teach English at Emory University before returning in 2002 to a full professorship at Boston University. Most important, both Jin and his hero make the difficult decision, much discussed in this novel, to write in the language of their adopted land, in the tradition of Conrad and Nabokov.
