Review of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream

By Katherine A. Powers

John Derbyshire, an Englishman who has lived in China and who now lives in New York, has produced a sweet, powerful work of art in his first novel.   Despite the general clunkiness of its title, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream is a masterpiece of style and a fine entertainment that could safely carry a money-back guarantee.

The story is told in the voice of 48-year-old Chai, once a mamber of the Chinese Red Guards, who escaped from the mainland 20 years ago by swimming the 4 miles to Hong Kong.  There he worked his way from factory drudge to bank courier to banker.  Having arrived in the United States eight years ago, he is now a vice president in his bank and is married to Ding, a much younger woman:  "I am glad I married so late," he remarks with his characteristic judiciousness.   "My first wife is my Second Wife.  This is very satisfactory.  I have all the advantage of a Second Wife, without alimony or visitation problems."   He and Ding now have a baby called Hetty and live on Long Island.

Still, his happy circumstances notwithstanding, and although he is tough and resourceful in the ways of the world, Chai is surprisingly removed from practical reality.  It is the life of the mind that absorbs him.   He is obsessed with language.  Moreover, he has pursued a series of spiritual affairs with great moral thinkers of the past, devoutly studying their lives and work, and shaping his own views according to theirs.  He has recently turned his attention from Samuel Johnson to Calvin Coolidge, whose austerity and probity he finds admirable in the highest degree.

And now, at the height of his Coolidge period, Chai learns that Selina, his first love from his days in Hong Kong, is living on the East Coast with the husband she married to enter the United States.  he tracks her down and endeavors to rekindle their affair, though with no intention of giving up Ding:  "I recalibrated my attitude to the whole matter of marital infidelity," he explains.   He takes satisfaction in the word "cicisbeo", a married woman's lover, and presents the existence of the word itself as an argument for acting on it when he meets his Selina.  It's "a very sophisticated word, for a sophisticated idea," he instructs her.  "You can be civilized without being ... puritanical," he concludes, betraying Ding and the ideas of Calvin Coolidge in one stroke.

Chai's longing for Selina springs from regret for his vanished youth, their cruel separation and from simple lust:  universal motivations.   But he is uniquely himself when he combines the titillation he gets from observing Selina walking toward him, with her pocketbook under her arm, with the frisson he feels from hitting on just the right word to describe it:  "the Chinese verb xie -- our language, in most respects as bare and poor as the stripped loess hillsides of the old heartland, boasts a sensational profusion of carry words, and I ... savor a tiny thrill each time I select precisely the right one."

Chai's preference for words over the world is a subtle and pervasive theme in this ingenious novel.  He is both seduced and redeemed by them.   In a wonderful way, his slightly dotty alienation from the world is a dimension of his integration into the great tradition of thought, of language.

In fact, Chai is his voice.  Hearing it, we are immediately pulled into the novel.  His elegantly understated narration arrests us on the first page as he portrays his family life.  "After putting Hetty to bed we had played a game of Scrabble, according to our custom.  This took us through the ten o'clock news to the rerun of Cheers on Channel 11.  It's a show Ding likes a lot.  Myself, somewhat less.  And this was one we had already seen before, not one of the better ones."

Philosophically deadpan, courtly, pedantic and sublimely spare, he later describes the most horrifying occurrences of his past:  a drowning, a beating, a rape.  In fact, Chai's precision etches events with invincible irony, to devastating effect.  At other times, for this is ultimately a cheerful book, his precise observations are extremely amusing.  For the thing is, Chai is not cut out for intrigue.  He is not practical enough.  His wife, on the other hand, is exceptionally so and launches a successful if utterly implausible scheme to regain her husband's loyalty.  The poor man spends the last part of the book being duped, punctiliously reporting events whose significance escapes him.  Even though the story's final, benign hoodwinking of its hero did not convince me at all, this astonishing first novel approaches perfection.