The Middle Kingdom

Grace Hoffmeir starts telling her story in 1989, as she bicycles around Beijing with her Eurasian child in the aftermath of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. In a first, brief flashback we learn how she came to be there three years earlier, the uncomfortable companion of her husband. Dr. Walter Hoffmeir is an ecology researcher, old and uptight before his time. Dr. Yu, a Chinese ecologist, befriends her and stays with her through a week of pneumonia. But the book begins with Grace gathering the notes of her own research on the ecological damage of acid rain to save her work from the soldiers savaging the campus. The first third of Andrea Barrett's Middle Kingdom sets Grace's story in the history of our time, in events we watched on CNN from around the world. Then Barrett, one of the most creative authors in the U.S. today, takes us through the decades of her protagonist's life, recalled in the delirium of her pneumonia. From her hippie marriage to a psychotic artist to her grad student days under Professor H we track her career as a second rate loser. Then, as his wife and lab assistant, she gains pounds for every bit of self-esteem she gives up. I would have been tempted to abandon her pathetic story had Andrea Barrett not already shown me Grace's strength in the opening pages of the novel. In the final third of Middle Kingdom the story returns to China, with Grace telling her husband she will remain in Beijing to work with Dr. Yu. An aspect of Barrett's genius as an author is this capacity to bring us into the lives of characters we normally would walk away from. From her first novel, Lucid Dreams, she has enabled us to inhabit awkward and ungainly lives (perhaps not too unlike our own) with deep respect. She captures us with the quality of her words, page to page, and the quality of her compassion for her characters. But she also holds our interest through her innovative approach to structure, each book flowing in a unique pattern. Middle Kingdom begins at the end of the story, flashes back through periods of Grace's life (all occurring in the delirium of her illness in Beijing), and then takes us again to the powerful ending. Lucid Stars' four sections trace an extended family's journey from the fifties to the end of the seventies. Each section focuses on a different character, with the chapters as episodes a few years apart. Forms of Water is also a family saga, but with the historic flashbacks occurring in the midst of the dramatic and amusing story of Uncle Brendan's flight from the nursing home. A final characteristic of particular interest in Middle Kingdom -- and all of Barrett's work -- is her deep fascination with science and her ability to make it integral to her character's lives. Grace may have dropped out of graduate school, tired of living in her husband's shadow, but she is an accomplished researcher and spends her years in China as part of a team studying a lake's damaged ecosystem. Each of