LOCKE 1928

Using a handful of characters, debut novelist Ryan offers impressions of a Chinese-American community in 1920s California.

Richard Fong is in bed with Chloe in a brothel. Down the hall, Poppy See mourns his abandonment of her, while on the river a craft bearing three mystery women gatecrashes the Dragon Boat Festival. The author offers a historically accurate portrait of Locke, an agricultural settlement near Sacramento leased to the Chinese by a white owner. The men work on the local ranches picking fruit and vegetables. We learn that 38-year-old Richard manages a gambling hall, that 17-year-old Chloe, the only Caucasian in the brothel, is his favored whore, that Poppy is the madam and that the arrival of the smuggled “boat-women” is a pivotal event. One of them is Ming Wai, who married Richard ten years earlier, in 1918, and lost face when he left China without her. Her two companions, given sanctuary in the church, have dozens of suitors in a town where men outnumber women 20 to one, but Ryan scants the comic/dramatic potential of this setup by skittishly turning her attention to other characters or evoking their pasts in their Chinese homeland. There’s a second, lightly sketched interracial relationship involving a Chinese pastor and his white wife, whose teenage daughter, a stereotypical danger-courting runaway, has become friendly with Chloe. The only real plotline traces Richard’s violent breakup with Chloe after his wife arrives; Poppy, a soothsayer, believes all three boat-women are water ghosts. The novel’s supernatural and realistic elements compete awkwardly for dominance. The supposed ghosts get their chance to wreak havoc when the levees break, but despite a number of deaths their status remains a mystery.

Fascinating material clumsily shaped.