Diary of a Madman

Ha Jin, who left China in 1985 and has never returned, became a literary star several years ago with the appearance of his National Book Award-winning novel Waiting. This work won its author praise for his spare prose style, keen descriptive eye, and ability to render effectively the frequent sorrows and occasional joys of flawed but empathetic characters struggling to make difficult choices in difficult circumstances. Waiting was also noteworthy for several other things. It maintained the reader’s interest despite a slow-moving and deceptively simple plotline: an educated man stationed in a city tries, without success, to gain a divorce from his uneducated rural wife so that he can marry a female coworker. It succeeded in making readers care about a protagonist whose main defining trait was indecisiveness. And it poignantly portrayed moral dilemmas that came across as distinctive to the warped political context of China in the latter part of the Maoist era (1949-1976) yet had universal resonance. The Crazed, Jin’s first novel since Waiting, is similar in many ways to its justly acclaimed predecessor. Once again, for example, the author uses crisp sentences to tell a story whose main elements can be summed up succinctly: after a literary scholar (Professor Yang) has a stroke and becomes delusional, a favored student (Jian Wan) devotes himself to caring for his mentor and rethinking his own future. Once again a central figure’s difficulty in making and sticking to decisions — Jian can’t decide whether to take an all-important examination and whether to break off his engagement to Yang’s daughter — works effectively as a focus of attention. And once again Jin limns problems that are specific to China yet speak to the human condition. This said, there are several important differences between the two novels. One is that, while Waiting was written in the third person, The Crazed is a firstperson narrative, so we see events only through Jian’s eyes. Part of the power and gentle humor of Waiting came from the author’s detached presentation of the conflicts facing his characters and the flaws of the society in which they lived. Here, however, criticism of things such as the corruption that riddles a system in which offending those who hold even minor positions of authority within the Party can dramatically affect one’s life are made much more explicitly — and with less irony and humor. Rather than being left to draw our own conclusions Critical Asian Studies 36:1 (2004), 162-167