I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China
*Starred Review* In the preface, translator Lovell meaningfully notes a portrait of Kafka in Zhu’s home; Borges, Vonnegut, and Swift are other suggested touchstones for Zhu’s fiction. The extravagant black humor of Terry Southern, suffused with irrationality and pain, also comes to mind, but Zhu’s characters and what happens to them are basically ordinary. In “A Boat Crossing,” a paranoid nebbish trying to move on from a village he’s tired of can’t get anyone, from his former workmates to his fellow travelers, to leave him alone. As excruciating as the greatest imaginable Three Stooges’ routine, the story ratchets up brusqueness and ill will toward an unforeseen explosion. Worse off yet is the computer engineer trapped in a neverending government project in “Ah, Xiao Xie”; he’s way more sinned against than sinning. The most repellent of Zhu’s raconteurish narrator-protagonists, the cynical young writer trying to see his visiting father, has a good time in “I Love Dollars” emerges the least scathed. Harsh satire of the new China of rampant capitalism under the aegis of rigid Communist oligarchs may power these stories, but they’re hilarious—though like a train wreck—quite apart from it. --Ray Olson