Review of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream

By John Stark Bellamy II

The habit of invoking historical muses for literary purposes may yet get out of hand.  Woody Allen may have started the craze with his exploitation of Humphrey Bogart as romantic mentor in Play It Again, Sam.  More recently the ghost of John Barrymore did similar service in the Broadway hit I Hate Hamlet!

But Calvin Coolidge as personal philosopher and role model?   It must have been a tough sell to the publisher.

Fortunately for first novelist John Derbyshire, 'Silent Cal' won't be a hard sell to readers of his consistently amusing, surprisingly light novel.  Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream is a mainly comic confection that hits far more than it misses in its chronicle of one very confused Chinese-American.

Chai, the book's middle-aging first-person voice, is happily married to the beauteous Ding and the father of daughter Hetty.  Or so it only seems, as Chai's chatty, light recollections of his life are gradually overcast by a secret crime and a disappointed love from his past.

Even as he chronicles the quiet pleasures of his domesticated maturity, he discloses the awful privations and cruelties of his youth in Mao's China, his escape to Hong Kong, and the love affair there with a girl named Selina whom he can't forget.  The novel's action is quickly precipitated by Chai's discovery that Selina is still alive, possibly available and quite probably the mother of his hitherto unknown son.

None of the machinations activated by the rekindling of Chai's long-lost lust would be enough to carry Derbyshire's novel by itself.

But what makes it work is the stream of verbal jokes Derbyshire wrings out of the differences between the English and Chinese languages and his book's central conceit, the historically unhilarious 30th president of the United States.

In an age of glib political gurus who too often parody themselves and our uncritical culture, Derbyshire understands that Calvin Coolidge increasingly looms as a giant of common sense, realistically low expectations and straightforward, uninflated language.  Improbable as it seems, readers of this book may begin to feel a burgeoning admiration for "Silent Cal" second only to Chai's.