Review of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream

By John Whitehead

Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, a buguiling first novel by a former teacher and journalist, may be the quietist novel yet written about revolution, communism, capitalism, sexual politics and Calvin Coolidge.  Of course, it may also be the only novel written about this strange confluence of topics.  T.C. Chai, a successful New York investment analyst, is a transplant for Mainland China, a veteran of the terrible Cultural revolution.  "Forty-eight years old, with a checkered past:  revolutionary, murderer, rapist, wife-betrayer ... but incompletely so in every case, and probably not indictable on any count, except perhaps conspiracy to rape."  Chai is a victim of circumstance and his own self-absorption.   Curiously detached from the pleasures and evils alike of his past lives in China and Hong Kong, he is a man who experiences life as if moving from dream to dream.

Chai complains that we are all "gummed down to the past like mice in a glue trap ... Ghosts, everyone haunted by ghosts.  In the Cultural Revolution we smashed everything old, everything we could find.  Now, for a moment, twenty-seven years later, I remembered why."  Revolution is a way of forgetting.  Chai himself has much to forget, including a harrowing incident with some of his Red Guard compatriots at the house of a professor and his family, a moment when, in an epiphany, he realized the leaders he'd thought were "dedicated revolutionaries, their shoulders to the wheel of history, sacrificing themselves for the good of the common people," were nothing more than "gangsters".

His memorable defection comes soon after, when, with two other men, he swims the four miles to Hong Kong under the moon:  "I never knew what happened to Huang Jen.  Little Tan drowned, I know.  We heard him drowning, far out from the shore where we could have done nothing to help him.  I heard his cries behind me-- I hear them still.  Only a kid, seventeen years old.  After the cries stopped, I could still hear Huang Jen's regular splashing, at eight o'clock behind me.  I heard it for a long time, until I entered a sort of dream state of exhaustion and despair, in which I thought I could still hear it ... but when consciousness returned, I was alone on the infinite sea, somehow still swimming, my arms and legs like concrete posts, yet still moving.

Still dreaming, yoo:  While in Hong Kong he gets his first taste of capitalism (developing a lifelong appetite) and has a doomed love affair with Selina, his time with her "a dream, a sweet, sweet dream."  She will become another of those ghosts who won't let him alone.  He moves to the United States, marries Ding, and has a daughter, and immerses himself in dead white historical figures:  he has memorized Great Expectations, for instance, and as the novel opens, his obsession with Samuel Johnson has given way to the complete absorption in the life and times of Coolidge, the last man to preside over the country before it slumped into its decade-long Depression.  He is attracted to the hale and hearty New England pieties of the Arcadian Coolidge, the aura of common-sense productivity that characterized the man and the country under his leadership.  (Never mind that in this, as in many things, Chai has his own way of perceiving the world:  His self-absorption leaves him nearly deaf and blind to all but what he wants to take in.)

Much of the novel concerns itself with Chai's attempts to return to a state of bliss described metaphorically in Chinese as the Peach Blossom Country, an idyllic land a fisherman stumbles upon once, leaves to fetch his family for, and can never find again.  Running into Selina years later in their newly-adopted homeland, he believes he is the lucky fisherman who has re-encountered that long-lost land, and he embarks on a painstaking course toward adultery, not realizing the difference between the dream and the reality of the Peach Blossom Country.  While we may not be able to go home again, John Derbyshire's clever, nuanced novel assures us that the possibility of a new home awaits-- warm, filled with love, and relatively ghost free.