Fiction

LITTLE GODS

By Meng Jin

Pushkin One/ Paperback/ 279 pages/ $29.95/ Available here

4 out of 5

Personal history is not so much a thread to be followed as a puzzle to be pieced together in Meng Jin's strong, compelling debut.

The Shanghai-born American author undoes the conventional route of coming-of-age immigrant fiction for a cerebral look at the forces that form one's perception of the self.

While it is told through the eyes of many characters, Jin's novel centres on the interior worlds of two women - mother Su Lan and daughter Liya - and their relationship.

Su Lan is a gifted physicist whose talents eventually take her out of rural China to America, where she raises her only child.

This dislocation forms a cultural and emotional rift between mother and daughter, one that both dance around but never truly address.

Su Lan, so eager to escape and erase her rural upbringing, also severs Liya from her own roots - a gap which she then seeks to fill by returning to China upon her mother's death.

Liya, born on the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre, grows up without any knowledge of her birth country or the identity of her father, a mystery which drives the plot.

In the construction of this search, Jin shows her skills as an architect of narrative.

She skips backwards and forwards in time, yet maintains enough of a thread for the reader to follow her through the maze of memory she builds.

While Liya's search for her origins forms the plot, Jin intelligently circles around this story, dipping into a host of side characters from both mother and daughter's pasts.

Watching Liya both through her own eyes and others' creates a patchwork sense of character, which captures her cultural confusion as a Chinese-American returning to China with a depth of nuance and accuracy.

Jin's prose is sharp and at times shocking in its psychological penetration, but tends towards overabstraction.

On occasion, the constant pain and loss becomes a repetitive drone which begins to pinch rather than punch.

Jin applies physical and scientific phenomena and theory to human interaction, forming a powerful through-line of imagery that holds the novel together despite its chronological complexity.

Upon finding her father, Liya uses the concept of a "black hole" to explain the gravitational pull a missing object can have - a heartbreaking description that is also in some ways strangely devoid of human emotion.

Jin often risks intellectualising emotion, bleeding it out of scenes which might do better with description rather than explanation.

This, along with the circling and indirect plot structure, leaves one feeling that things have not been fully resolved at the finish.

And yet perhaps this idiosyncratic refusal of a clean conclusion should be read as a strength rather than a weakness.

It purposefully avoids a conventional end in pursuit of what may be a more truthful picture of the ugliness sometimes found in returning home.

If you like this, read: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (Penguin, 2014, $19.62, available here). This debut novel circles around the family mysteries stirred up by a death in a mixed-race Chinese-American family.