THE MAN WHO DAMMED THE YANGTZE

This so-called mathematical novel from the Chinese-American poet and novelist (A Chinaman's Chance, 2011, etc.) is meta-fiction that tracks two linked characters.

Call them alter egos, call them doppelgängers, or simply call them by their names: G and Ge. G is a Chinese-American man in the U.S.; Ge is a Chinese woman in mainland China. Both are pursuing careers involving finite numbers. How many degrees separate them is a question best left to mathematicians. The key point is that neither cuts the umbilical cord to their creator, or knows the joy of autonomy. When we meet them in 1968, they are young teachers. G is at a small state university in Oshkosh, Wis.; Ge is also a university teacher, changing cities to avoid the state-sanctioned Red Guards, destructive hooligans still in their teens. Ferment in China, ferment in America. G is approached by the Black Student Union; he agrees to be their faculty advisor. There is a brief disturbance in the President’s office; over 100 students are arrested. The last straw comes for G when his department supports the administration; he quits teaching the same time Ge quits, strangers acting in concert. G moves to Pittsburgh to work for Westinghouse, while Ge’s hired by a state planning office, her focus is sedimentation caused by the Three Gorges Project. Dams in China, dams in America, as seen by two mathematicians with a shared social conscience. Ge concludes Three Gorges represents “vanity and greed”; G obsesses about the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, “that has turned the environment…to shit.” The mathematical novel merges with the hydrodynamics novel. There is no plot, but there is a point of view, a humanist aversion to the arrogance of power, whether implemented by corporations or the state. The meta-fictional quirks, when the veil separating author and reader disappears, don’t amount to much. The novel ends with G and Ge working on papers with identical titles for an international conference on numbers.

A sterile account of parallel lives.