Is it bad form to criticize a novel for its font?¹ Don’t answer that, because I’m going to do it anyway. If you open and flip through Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, you’ll see that the entire book is set in a Courier-like typewriter font. This choice supposedly makes the text appear like a screenplay, because the story is about a character, Willis Wu, who is… uh… a character in a TV show? Let me come back to that.

As you continue to flip through the pages of the book, you will next see that there are indeed sections of dialogue which are formatted like a screenplay, where the character name (in uppercase), and the lines that they speak (in lowercase), are centred on the page.

					SPECIAL GUEST STAR

Right. I do.

						LEE

Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go.

Footnotes

1. One of my favourite series of recent years, the Outline trilogy by Rachel Cusk, is typeset in Optima, a sans-serif which, while unusual and frankly not my favourite, did not detract from the experience of reading the prose. ↩

After my experience with Beijing Confidential, I felt compelled to expose myself to writing about China by native and contemporary authors. China in Ten Words wasn’t exactly what I was looking for—I wanted more focus on modern China, i.e. what is it like now—but it was still an enlightening read.

Each of the ten essays in this collection is a meditation on a Chinese phrase, which are all shown on the cover, in case you’re too lazy to open to the table of contents.

I was a bit impatient through the first half of the book, which deals with the author’s childhood during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s. It covers ground that doesn’t feel new to me because of my time with other books. I wanted him to get to the present day, which he does indeed do towards the second half. I would say that the earlier parts of the book do lay an important foundation for the rest of it, because as a whole, the book can be seen as a compare-and-contrast exercise between the time of Mao’s rule and today.

In one memorable passage, Yu describes an incident during his childhood, when he and some other kids enacted vigilante justice against a man who was illegally trading food stamps. The kids physically assaulted the man, but the man didn’t retaliate; instead, he broke down and cried in remorse.

In contrast, Yu recounts a story from more recent times, where an unlicensed street vendor stabbed and killed a government official who was trying to enforce the rules by shutting down the shop.

Yu sees this as a breakdown in the morality of the country. He seems almost nostalgic for the black-and-white authoritarianism of Mao’s day, as opposed to the everyone-for-themselves mentality of today. He acknowledges the brutality of the past, especially for the violent acts of his youth, but suggests that there was some value in unity, where everyone agrees what’s right and wrong. The man that Yu and the other kids assaulted didn’t retaliate because he knew he was breaking the rules.

So China moved from Mao Zedong’s monochrome era of politics-in-command to Deng Xiaoping’s polychrome era of economics above all. “Better a socialist weed than a capitalist seedling,” we used to say in the Cultural Revolution. Today we can’t tell the difference between what is capitalist and what is socialist—weeds and seedlings come from one and the same plant.

• Yu Hua

Personally, I’ve seen this attitude from the older generations of my family, who seem to believe that obedience is paramount. I don’t always agree, but I’ve been trying to recognize where they’re coming from. This book has further enlightened me to the differences between the two cultures that I inhabit.

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Frankly, I’m surprised I finished this book. I sort of saw it as part of my current project to work my way up to reading Infinite Jest. (Which is currently sitting on my dining room table. I’m afraid to shelve it lest the lack of a visual reminder will make me forget that I have it. It is also my hope that visitors will be impressed by the sight of the thing.)

Anyway, I figured I would read a bit of Everything and More, see what it’s like, and skim through the rest when the math got too hairy. Now, I’m not claiming that I understood all of the math and that it didn’t get hairy, or that I never skimmed through any of it at all, but I did follow the general gist for most of the way, or at least enough that I never felt like slamming the book closed and hurling it across the room.

This I credit to DFW’s writing style. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything where the text was so aware of its being read. There are constantly little asides and apologies (many in Wallace’s trademark footnotes) about how difficult a particular section is, how you might want to re-read this or that paragraph, how it’s all going to be OK in the end. These constant conversational reassurances do a lot to encourage the reader (me, at least) to keep going, despite the difficult math.

And there is a suspense to it all too. Cantor is mentioned near the beginning and is set up to be the Hero of the Story, the one whose theories are the ultimate culmination of everything I’m reading, and I genuinely felt the urge to know what Cantor did, like wanting to find out who the killer is in a mystery novel. Wallace does a good job of reminding us how each theory through history will be relevant to Cantor’s transfinite numbers, while making each theory interesting to learn about on its own. And while the actual proofs and formulae are explained well, I found the most enjoyment in the connective tissue about the like societal and cultural and historical contexts around each discovery, e.g. the geometric rigidity of the Greeks, the need to develop and accept infinitesimals in physics and science during the time of Newton and Leibniz, &c. I actually wish he had focussed on those contexts more, and I think he probably could have written a thousand-page book (it amazes me how much research must have gone into this as is). I would probably have still read it all.

Perdido Street Station is a great mix of setting, plot and character. I admit that for the first few chapters, I was a little weary. The main plot hadn’t kicked in yet, and I was just getting introduced to the characters, so it felt like the book was spending a lot of time describing the setting. I think it’s a weakness in my reading habits that setting doesn’t capture my attention as much as plot and character development, so I found myself starting to skim over some of the longer descriptive passages. However, the city of New Crobuzon is so unique that whenever my attention started to waver, some imaginative element of the world would pull me back in.

Once the plot started to get going, it really absorbed me. Almost every scene introduced an interesting new element, which made the world seem like it was constantly expanding.

If I had one problem with the book, it’s that there were maybe too many ideas. The fantasy setting was established early on, and it’s a world where anything goes, and anything can happen. This was cool most of the time because there was always a sense that something unexpected would happen. However, there were subplots and tangents which seemed to me like they were just put there to introduce a crazy idea. The meeting with the Ambassador from Hell comes to mind; there’s great imagery in that scene, but the character of the Ambassador, and the fact that our protagonists can freely communicate with Hell, never show up again.

This is a minor criticism, though, and overall, I enjoyed Perdido Street Station very much.