Review of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream

By Rich Lowry

Calvin Coolidge seems an unlikely central prop for a story about love.  But in Englishman John Derbyshire's first novel, the thirtieth president is a perfect fit.  Not only is "Silent Cal" integrated smoothly into its themes of faithfulness and responsibility, he represents its virtues as a piece of art; spare and economizing, never guilty of overreaching.  Not much happens in Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream -- no outlandish plot twists or particularly high drama -- but by its end, Derbyshire has, with precision and wit, laid bare the fabric of a marriage, and the moral commitment it takes to make it work.

T.C. Chai is a financial analyst for a New York investment bank.  A lapsed member of the Red Guards, he fled China after the Cultural Revolution for Hong Kong, where he had a torrid love affair with a woman (Selina) engaged to marry a man in San Francisco.  After about a year or so she leaves for America and her fiancé.  Chai, devastated, eventually makes his way to the United States, too.   We meet him happily married in Long Island, with a baby girl, enjoying the rhythms of daily life with a beautiful woman (Ding) whom he met late in life, and for that reason affords him "all the advantage of a Second Wife, without alimony or visitation problems."

Chai is a well-read man, given to periodic obsessions with odd historical figures (Calvin Coolidge is the latest) and notably sensitive to the intricacies of language.  He is proud of his English, which he learned by memorizing all of David Copperfield back on the mainland.  He often plays Scrabble with his wife, spotting her fifty points and playing certain words just to widen her vocabulary.  It is appropriate, then, that a vocabulary word heralds the arrival of his marital crisis:  palindrome.

Someone mentions the word at a dinner party in connection with the name -- Yoy -- of an owner of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, Chinese restaurant.   Yoy happens to be the same name as his Hong Kong fling's husband.  Suddenly Chai is caught in an obsession with his past.  Could it be the same Yoy?  If so, can his love for Selina be rekindled?  Chai travels to Cambridge "to close the circle, to find out."  As he rediscovers Selina and secretly struggles to seduce her, the bonds of his marriage with Ding begin almost imperceptibly -- backs turned to each other at night, subtle tensions in their voices -- to dissolve.

Chai, who before had impressed us with his solid good sense and fine perceptions, is about to risk everything on an insipid affair.   "Ghosts," he says to himself, "everyone is haunted by ghosts.   In the Cultural Revolution we smashed everything old, everything we could find.   Now, for a momenht, twenty-seven years later, I remembered why."  Chai's plight is meant to parallel that of China, where everything is "cumbered by this dark calciferous mass of associations from the past."

But the past is merely a passive agent; it can't drag Chai down without his choosing it.  So in Chai's pursuits of Selina there is a hit of the same willfulness that prompted his band of Red Guards so long ago to rape a professor's daughter (another ghost).  And, in the end, a frank hedonism informs his adulterous exertions.  "I want you," Chai pleads with Selina, "I need you.   I love you.  How can it be wrong?"

The antidote to all this, implausibly enough, is Calvin Coolidge.  As we follow Chai in his research and musings on Coolidge -- initially sparked by Paul Johnson's Modern Times -- the belittled president emerges as an inadvertent poet and something of a moral philosopher.  Chai savors an impromptu line Coolidge delivered once when visiting his native Vermont:  "Here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of our everlasting hills."  Coolidge, in Chai's mind, is almost a Confucian.  "Progress is slow and the result of a long and arduous process of self-discipline," the president said in one of his morality-laden speeches.  "Real reform does not begin with a law, it ends with a law.  The attempt to dragoon the body when the need is to convince the soul will end only in revolt."

Coolidge's gods are those of Kipling's copybook headings, easily dismissed by sophisticates, but tested by the centuries.  The past?  For Coolidge, it is the challenge of every man to live his life in such a way that he is his own hero.  Freedom?  To make our way in the world, yes, but not without responsibility.  Adultery?  Unthinkable.  When Coolidge inserts himself in Chai's late decision-making in an unexpected way, Derbyshire succeeds in wrapping his first novel into a neat package, every page of which delights.  Sensitively rendered, written with grace and zip, thematically profound, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream is a quiet triumph.  The laconic Coolidge himself might sum it up in one word:   excellent.