I’ve long been partial to E.M. Forster’s formulation that the role of fiction — or one of them, anyway — is to suggest a “buzz of implication,” a flavor of time and place more nuanced than history allows. That’s because fiction is an art of narrative, of emotion, defined by the singular movements of individuals as they navigate specific corners of the world.

“One of the great pleasures of the [novel],” Jane Smiley has written, “was something outside of the authors’ plot making and character drawing and theme organizing — it was the pleasure I gained from the author’s passing observations or remarks. I came to see these passing phrases as … precious artifacts of what a man — say, Walter Scott — happened to see one day while he was walking down a street in 1810; or what a woman, Elizabeth Bowen, happened to feel one evening while dancing the fox-trot in 1925; or what another man, Nikolai Gogol, happened to smell and hear by the banks of the Dnieper River one morning in 1820.”

The tension is that this particularity becomes a universalizing impulse, allowing us to imagine our way into circumstances that may appear to have little to do with our own.

Such a dynamic resides at the heart of The Fat Years, the first novel by Chinese writer Chan Koonchung to be translated into English. Taking place in 2013, after a global economic crisis so severe that it “makes the shock of 2008 resemble a mere wobble,” the novel posits a world in which China alone is financially and socially stable.

“Only China has been able to recover, surging forward while the others are on the decline,” says Lao Chen, the novel’s sometime narrator and main protagonist, a Taiwanese living in Beijing. “… Even more importantly, there has been no social upheaval; our society is even more harmonious now.”

There’s a catch, though: Somehow, somewhere, the Chinese people have lost a month, the period between the economic collapse and the beginning of “China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy.” Is it mere forgetfulness? Is it a government conspiracy? “Today, a normal person doesn’t remember,” a character named Little Dong tells Lao Chen halfway through the novel. “[T]hose of us who remember are the abnormal ones.”

For Chan, this is the central issue, although, in truth, the lost month is mostly a McGuffin, a hook to draw us into the narrative. More essential is his portrayal of contemporary China as a place of laughter and forgetting, in which acquisitiveness and creature comforts have insulated the population from larger questions of liberty and identity.

“What is the meaning of existence?” Lao Chen’s friend Little Xi asks, before quoting Jean-Paul Sartre: “We must take responsibility for our own lives.” Yet throughout The Fat Years, Chan offers a vision of China as a culture in which individual responsibility has been eclipsed by an unspoken pact between the government and its citizens, in which the former offers a constrained facsimile of freedom, and the latter indulges in a fog of consumerist bliss.

• Published Jan 18, 2012 02:07:05PM 0 Comments

• Published Jan 18, 2012 08:26:03AM 0 Comments

• Published Jan 17, 2012 05:45:02PM 0 Comments

“Can we really blame the common people for their historical amnesia?” Lao Chen wonders. “… We are already very free now: 90 percent, or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 percent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn’t that enough? The vast majority of the population cannot even handle 90 percent freedom, they think it’s too much. Aren’t they already complaining about information overload and being entertained to death?”

On the one hand, that’s the stuff of satire, a dystopian riff out of Aldous Huxley or Philip K. Dick. At the same time, Chan is after something deeper, a consideration of the way forgetting influences polity. “During the Cultural Revolution and at the beginning of Reform and Opening,” he writes, “there were very few books in the bookstores, and everyone knew that the true facts were being suppressed. But, today, thought Lao Chen, there is a profusion of books everywhere, so many they knock you over, but the true facts are still being suppressed. It’s just that people are under the illusion that they are following their own reading preferences and freely choosing what they read.”

There it is again, that information overload — but even more a certain kind of information overload, the overload of trivia. In such a landscape, government doesn’t need to suppress unpleasant history; we do it ourselves, every day, simply by not paying close enough attention to the facts at hand. “For the great majority of young mainland Chinese,” Chan suggests, “the events of the Tiananmen Massacre have never entered their consciousness; they have never seen the photographs and news reports about it, and even fewer have their family or teachers ever explained it to them. They have not forgotten it; they have never known anything about it. In theory, after a period of time has elapsed, an entire year can indeed disappear from history — because no one says anything about it.”

This is it: that sense of the particular with a touch of the universal creeping in. This is what Forster and Smiley were getting at, and it’s a key factor in The Fat Years as well. Here, Chan has crafted a cunning caricature of modern China, with its friction between communism and consumerism, its desire to reframe the Revolution in terms of “market share and the next big thing.” But he has also identified a deeper dislocation, one stretching beyond China.What is the malaise of the West, after all, if not a similar imbalance between materialism and inattention, in which history eludes us not because of anyone erasing it but because we don’t remember anymore? When Chan writes, late in the novel, that “the Central Propaganda organs did do their work, but they were only pushing along a boat that was already on the move,” he may as well be speaking for all of us.

“If the Chinese people themselves had not already wanted to forget,” he notes, “we could not have forced them to do so. The Chinese people voluntarily gave themselves a large dose of amnesia medicine.” The point is that we are responsible for what happens, just as we have always been.

In the process of navigating our economic landscape, we are perpetually encountering risks. These risks not only present themselves from the standpoint of the market and the economy but also on a much larger scale from a social, political, and personal perspective as well.

How do we learn to manage risks going forward? We are compelled to study and appreciate the lessons from the past.

To do just that, I strongly encourage people to read a recently released book which takes us back to the volatile days of the late 1960s. This literary masterpiece very personally details how a group of young African American students and the Jesuit mentor who recruited them to college took very real risks. What was the result of managing these great risks?

A foundation for long term and very real rewards. This fascinating book is Fraternity by Diane Brady. 

I will admit I am slightly biased but enormously proud that Fraternity is largely set upon the campus of my Alma Mater, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Brady descriptively outlines how Fr. John Brooks, a Jesuit priest at Holy Cross, took very real risk in 1968 in the personal recruitment of young African American students to what was then a virtually all white campus. Recall that at this point in our nation’s history we were experiencing significant racial turmoil culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Brooks took the not insignificant financial, administrative, and professional risks at this point in time because he knew that Holy Cross as an institution needed to embrace these young men and the African American community at large if it were to advance its mission and elevate its vision going forward.

What about the young men themselves? What possessed these men largely from the inner citi (NYSE:C)es of New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Detroit to venture to a middle sized industrial city in central Massachusetts when most had opportunities to attend college elsewhere in more comfortable surroundings?

Well, while not every African American student who ventured to Holy Cross at that point in time went on to graduate and achieve untold success, do you think it is mere coincidence that those profiled in Fraternity did achieve remarkable success. Who are they? They include current Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, noted attorney Ted Wells, Pulitzer Prize winning author Ed Jones, legendary Wall Street financier Stan Grayson, and former NFL player and Massachusetts policy maven Eddie Jenkins.

The more I read the more I appreciated that Brooks and these then young men had a real sense of shared commitment. That bond did not mean that they always saw eye to eye on every issue. In fact, they tested and challenged each other repeatedly and took real risks in the process. Why? Those challenges spurred real personal growth for the individuals and the institution.

As I read Fraternity I also learned that whether they knew it or not at the time that the shared sense of commitment held by a visionary Jesuit priest and a group of ambitious young African America students was ultimately a love affair.

The power of this virtue known as love mitigated the risks these men took but then also provided the foundation for remarkable success in their lives.

Somewhat uncannily I am now rereading the longstanding #1 bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie with a group of young men. That book by Mitch Albom was embraced across America because it also taught us albeit in hindsight about the power of love.

Fraternity teaches us that in the face of very real risks, dreams can be achieved, visions can be realized, and lives can be changed when love is embraced and people give of themselves for a cause and a mission greater than personal self-interest.

That love was abundant at Holy Cross in the late 1960s and still is today. As a graduate I am most proud.

Given the challenges facing our country at this time and for the foreseeable future I would hope that collectively we might stop, pause, and appreciate that love is the greatest risk mitigant known to mankind.

That virtue of love is the embodiment of our Sense on Cents’ virtues of truth, transparency, and integrity. If only those leading our political and financial institutions could appreciate and practice real love in the midst of pursuing profit. Love is truly a great business model.

You don’t believe me? Read Fraternity by Diane Brady. The lessons and virtues highlighted within are also the stuff of a longstanding best seller.

I only wish I had the movie rights.

Larry Doyle

Isn’t it time to subscribe to all my work via e-mail, RSS feed, on Twitter or Facebook?

Do your friends, family, and colleagues a favor and get them to do the same. Thanks!!

I have no affiliation or business interest with any entity referenced in this commentary. The opinions expressed are my own. I am a proponent of real transparency within our markets, our economy, and our political realm so that meaningful investor confidence and investor protection can be achieved.

On a perfectly ordinary day in October, with no warning, millions of people around the world simply disappear. They come from all backgrounds, ethnicities, ages, religions. They are parents, spouses, children, friends. They are gone, with no explanation, and the question is: How do the people who are left behind — the “leftovers” — deal with it?

This is the premise of Tom Perrotta’s new novel. The setting is a small suburban New England town. The principal characters are people many of us would recognize, ordinary people. By getting into their heads, Perrotta explores each person’s reaction to this apparently random, unexplainable event, while following the course of their lives afterward.

Tom Perrotta has been crowned the chronicler of American suburban life. My favorite two novels by him, The Wishbones (1997) and Little Children (2004), could be read as a mini-epic of modern life in the suburbs, pre- and post-marriage. I like Perrotta as a writer, and his writing never fails to entertain me. His books are quick reads, and his characters are people I could know. But I keep wishing he would do something bigger, something larger, explore a new direction.

I was hoping that The Leftovers would be that departure for him. The premise is a radically different one for a man who has previously written about wedding bands, high school elections, and adultery, more the province of science fiction or fantasy than literary fiction. But once the premise is established, The Leftovers is not that much different from Perrotta’s other books. The issues he probes are still the ordinary problems of ordinary people: a failing marriage, a cheating husband, teenagers struggling for identity. Only in the The Leftovers, these problems are magnified through the lens of unfathomable tragedy.

Like the characters in the novel, I really didn’t know how to react to this Rapture-like event that Perrotta has established. That’s because no explanation is given for it; each person has to come up with his or her own rationale for what happened. Normally, I would appreciate this kind of ambiguity, but Perrotta’s premise is so vague that I felt like I had no way to connect to it. The characters could be reacting to any large, random tragedy, such as another September 11. There is no authorial sense of the supernatural here, even though this was clearly a supernatural event. I felt I needed a little more guidance from the author as to how to process this, so that I could relate better to the characters and their different forms of grieving.

In Michael Fischman’s book, Stumbling Into Infinity: An Ordinary Man in the Sphere of Enlightenment, it becomes apparent that Fischman is neither ordinary nor stumbling. While he emphasizes that this is his personal story, he has adeptly written a debut nonfiction work that is multiple books at once, layered one beneath the other and bound together by everyman’s search for the answer to the question ‘Why am I here?’ Nearly all of us ask this question more than once in our lives, but Fischman is a man driven more intensely than most to find the answer. His passionate quest makes for an extraordinary memoir.

In the first chapter Fischman writes that his parents, perhaps to protect his innocence, had kept his grandfather’s death a secret from him. He recalls, “One night, when I was about three-years-old, while my parents and sister were asleep…I awoke before dawn and saw Grandpa. Transparent as a mist of smoke he stood still in our bedroom doorway… I didn’t know why he was there.” The author continues, “And it was many years before I realized that Grandpa’s death had coincided with the time of his mysterious visit. At age eight, alone in his Grandma’s hospital room, he saw her take her last breath. “I knew she was gone. I stood shaking, as though I’d been dipped in ice water. I’d seen death.”

Perhaps his early childhood experience with death, and physical abuse by his father, explains the author’s ever present concern with the meaning of life and living a better life. Or perhaps, as he speculates, you could blame it on growing up in the sixties and seventies. Whatever the reasons, Fischman remembers from his college experiences that “I was more interested in attaining a state of Nirvana and enlightenment that studying for my chemistry finals and graduating from college.” But like most Westerners, Fischman believed then that one should be independent minded and find their own way in spiritual matters. This first layer of the memoir continues to follow Fischman’s quest, ultimately leading the reader to his close friendship with one of the Eastern world’s great spiritual gurus and the assumption of the leadership of his U.S. organization.

Written by former child star/current Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Kyle Richards, Life Is Not A Reality Show: Keeping It Real with the Housewife Who Does It All is part life story, part self-help book, part relationship and style tips, and something Real Housewives fans will probably like very much.

The book is not an autobiography, strictly speaking. It’s not even a chronology – while Richards shares stories from her life, she does so in bits and pieces through a series of extended sidebars (in fact, this book may take the prize for the most sidebars ever to appear in a single tome).

Advertisement

Though Richards tells some insightful stories about her mother and father, her children and her sisters, the focus of this book is on no-nonsense relationship and parenting advice, most of it dispensed through the filter of the author’s own experience as a wife and mother. The balance of the rest of the book is devoted to Richards’ personal grooming and style tips.

With its copious amounts of hair, makeup and clothing advice, it should be noted that this really isn’t a book for men. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I could only force myself to skim some of the parts about personal appearance, and if wind up with less luxuriant hair as a result . . . well, so be it).

This is a book aimed squarely at the In Style, Elle, People-reading, Lifetime-and Bravo-watching female demographic, and it hits that target dead-on. Richards understands her audience and plays directly to it, presenting large amounts of information her readers will find useful in a breezy, easy-to-read manner.

There’s no co-author listed, and the prose reads as if Richards did, indeed, write it herself, which is both good and bad. On one hand it can be engaging, as if you’re spending time hanging out with Richards as she goes about her day. That casual approach is very humanizing and provides an interesting glimpse behind the curtain of the glamorous way her life is portrayed on the show.

On the downside, Richards makes some basic first-time writer mistakes – for instance, when she wants to convey humor, she often ends her sentences with, “Ha ha!” She also conveys enthusiasm and excitement by using an overabundance of exclamation points! Which can be really intrusive after a while! Not to mention somewhat repetitive! So stop it, Kyle!

Hemingway it ain’t, but then again, that’s not the point of a book of this type. If you’re looking for a highbrow literary effort, well . . . generally speaking, any book that contains the phrase “muffin top” is not aimed at the literati set.

But if you’re a woman who’s looking for a book that’s full of useful information about relationships, parenting, hair, makeup and clothing – all related in a fun, personable manner by a person who seems ultimately very likable – Life Is Not a Reality Show is probably just your style.