NoveList Book Discussion Guide
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Heaven Lake
by John Dalton
(New York: Scribner, 2004)
AUTHOR:
John Dalton was born in Kirkwood, Missouri in 1963, the youngest of seven children. There was little in his upbringing that pointed toward a place in the literary spotlight, but talent and persistence have caught the critics’ attention. Dalton’s father died when John was fifteen, and a school experience that had been uninspiring turned downright troublesome. Pointed toward a vocational program that had him cleaning pots in a hospital kitchen and reading "manuals about soup ladles," he learned that enrolling in college would be a benefit to his family, and he did so.
His early education (Parkway South H.S., University of Missouri/St. Louis) was solid, without being flashy. He did not stand out, and he did not draw attention to himself: "I was a very anonymous figure." He began a circuitous approach to his eventual educational destination: "because of lack of focus and funds I attended four colleges before committing myself to studying English at UMSL." There, he got to know David Carkeet, who was living proof that a writer could successfully base his work on St. Louis and the Midwest. When Dalton graduated from UMSL, his brother gave him a round-the-world ticket, and the young graduate exposed himself to an exotic world-Thailand, Australia, Fiji, Taiwan-that would stand him in good stead when he began to write. He taught English in Taiwan, and he met the woman he would marry. Parts of his not-yet-written novel were becoming easier to write.
Actually writing the novel would involve still another level of education and preparation. Dalton applied to a string of MFA writing programs, and was turned down by all but the last, at the University of Iowa, arguably the nation’s most prestigious. Upon completion of that program in 1993, Dalton did the kind of here-and-there university teaching that young writers do, all the while working away at his first novel, Heaven Lake.
While his life was just what was expected of a beginning writer, Dalton was not entirely comfortable with how his career was developing: "It is somewhat romantic to be a struggling artist in your mid-twenties, less so in your early thirties." Producing his first book was not a quick and easy process; the novel’s gestation stretches over better than eight years. Getting published turned out to be much easier than getting the book written; Dalton sent the manuscript to better than a dozen publishers: "nearly half were interested in publishing the novel." It finally came out in April 2004, to considerable fanfare. Publishers Weekly thought that it could turn into "one of the spring’s-if not the year’s-biggest debuts." Dalton does not plan on becoming a novelist of China; what he is working on now is "a novel that begins in a summer camp in the midwest in the 1970’s and then leaps forward and revisits the same characters years later in the present day."
SUMMARY:
Heaven Lake is the story of Vincent Saunders, a young American "Jesus teacher" from "a small town called Red Bud, in the Illinois province," (p. 6) who travels to Toulio, Taiwan, to try to convert the Chinese residents. Picked up at the station by a limping Shao-fei, he is taken to his room at the Chens. There he is fellow guest with Alec McGowan, a profane, cynical Scotsman of intermittent employment and irreverent impulse. Vincent tries to temper his goody-goody image-"I’m not the prude you think I am" (p. 22) - but not with much success.
He tracks down Christian-connected Mrs. Liang, from whom he is able to rent a house that will serve as a base for his mission. He advertises English lessons, which he hopes to mix with Bible lessons. An encouraging number of students show up, including the wealthy Mr. Gwa (and his chauffeur Ponic, named after the Bonneville that he drives). Gwa is not really interested in learning English, but he would like to employ Vincent in his scheme to bring the beautiful Kai-ling from China’s western provinces to Taiwan. The plan, in brief, would be for Vincent to travel to Urumchi, Xinjiang, where he would marry Kai-ling (relatively easier for an American than for Gwa). He would bring Kai-ling back to Taiwan, where they would divorce, and she would go to Gwa. It’s a scheme that is too time-consuming and too unsavory for Vincent to take seriously.
Meanwhile, the Toulio mission develops interestingly. Vincent lands a job as teacher at the Ming-da Academy, where he is hired to teach a class of more than forty teen-age girls. One of them, Trudy, sets her sights on Vincent-she asks in class "do I have a chance to be your girlfriend?" (p. 100)-and he is finally unable or unwilling to resist. The relationship turns into a full-fledged affair, regularly consummated at the mission house. While this is going on upstairs, Vincent’s new mission associate, Gloria Hamilton, is toiling away at her calligraphy in a windowless room under the first floor stairs. Gloria is another "Jesus teacher," driven and obsessive in her approach to God and to China.
The affair with Trudy becomes known to her family, and the girl’s older brother administers a painful beating to Vincent and makes it clear that "you should go back to America" (p. 148). While he does not do that, his disgrace disrupts his program’s small success, and he needs to do something else. He decides to take Mr. Gwa up on his earlier offer.
It is arranged that hash-smoking Alec will make the trip with Vincent, who gets his funding from Gwa’s agent, and sets out on his journey. "Days on end they did nothing but ride the trains." (p. 213) Their travels include everything from a hippie-like gathering of young foreigners in Yangshuo, to a poignant meeting with an ailing woman who carried with her a pair of dead girl twins, to consistently miserable experiences in Lahzhou, which "may have been the most unhappy place he had ever visited." (p. 233)
Alec disappears, and Vincent finds himself in Urumchi, where Kai-ling and her family live. Things are not exactly as Mr. Gwa has described them. While the parents are overwhelmed by the huge cash settlement Vincent brings, their daughter has been making other plans. Bureaucratic obstacles are overcome, but just four days before the scheduled wedding, Kai-ling pulls out. She seizes an opportunity to move to Shanghai with her local admirer, Wei-han, and Vincent is left to pick up the pieces as best he can.
Frenzied long-distance communication results in Gwa’s Plan B: He wires "MARRY THE SONGS’ YOUNGER DAUGHTER AND RETURN TO TAIWAN . . . SAME AGREEMENT." (p. 318) While this seems outrageous to Vincent, he passes the message on, and the sister, Jia-ling, agrees.
They marry and head for Taiwan, now accompanied once again by Alec. Jia-ling is safely brought to a Taiwan hotel, but Alec is arrested for drug smuggling at the Hong Kong border. A little later, Jia-ling disappears as well, and Mr. Gwa’s agent tells Vincent that Gwa has come and collected his second-choice bride and taken her away.
Vincent returns to Toulio, but Jia-ling’s odd disappearance begins to worry him. He hears rumors of Gwa’s connection to prostitution, and wonders to what life he had brought the girl. His attempts to investigate are futile, but his once-again landlord, Mrs. Liang, is able to track down information which finally leads Vincent to the missing girl. She has been designated as a wife for Ponic, and has been living at his house, ordered about by Ponic’s mother. Vincent mounts a somewhat melodramatic rescue, and rides away to the mission house, with Jia-ling on the pillion.
Further meetings with Gwa and Ponic leave Vincent set up to pay a kind of "protection" for the privilege of remaining in Toulio with Jia-ling. She, meanwhile, appears to care little for Vincent, but concentrates on the factory job she has landed. Trudy’s brother reappears, and there is another fight with Vincent, this one a draw. Jia-ling nurses her battered Vincent, and the last words she speaks in the novel give it a potentially upbeat ending: "Keep trying. You may be closer than you think." (p. 448)
QUESTIONS:
While answers are provided, there is no presumption that you have been given the last word. Readers bring their own personalities to the books that they are examining. What is obvious and compelling to one reader may be invisible to the next. The questions that have been selected provide one reasonable access to the text; the answers are intended to give you examples of what a reflective reader might think. The variety of possible answers is one of the reasons we find book discussions such a rewarding activity.
What benefit can we expect from travel?
In effect, Dalton followed up getting his undergraduate degree with a contemporary equivalent of the Grand Tour, traveling around the world with his eyes open and his notebook at the ready. His novel, too, matches that model as Vincent crosses vast stretches of physical territory while struggling with similar stretches of internal landscape. The question is unavoidable: What benefit can we expect from travel? An answer takes a long time to emerge. Alec gives an early assessment that is in unsurprising synch with the drug-assisted lifestyle he has adopted: "Traveling’s mainly unpleasant. . . . Eighty percent shit, twenty percent brilliant." (p. 215) The brilliant bits apparently compensate for the unpleasant norm, since Alec is a regular traveler. Vincent, on the other hand, hopes not to be as much at the mercy of arbitrary highs and lows; he wants to learn, to experience approaches to life that are not his own, but that have proven workable to others. Almost his first reaction to China is worry that all he has found is a setting that is different, not one that has useful things to teach him: "What strangeness. For this he’d journeyed seven thousand miles from home?" (p. 12) Alec, in explaining the limitations of travel, winds up supplying the reason that Vincent is feeling so frustrated and unfulfilled: "A traveler is a bystander who’s not obliged to get involved, who couldn’t really get involved even if he wanted to." (p. 337) This distance is exactly what Vincent does not want. Wrestling with his personal demons of loneliness and desire, what Vincent is looking for is involvement, or in Alec’s terms, to be something other than a traveler. The book comes to a resolution when Vincent comes to rest. But his travels were an essential part of his learning about himself. The process was not entirely understandable, but it was undeniably effective: "What could he say about the long journey he’d made? That it had been for nothing? That he’d failed at everything he’d set out to do? That it had changed him for the better anyway?" (p. 442)
Sex and the single Jesus teacher.
Dalton wrote his novel with a firm foundation insight that "the world is a complicated and contrary place," and sex fits easily into that assessment. For Vincent, uncomfortable in his isolation, sex is a way to show himself that he is not really alone, that his life touches others’. Unfortunately, Trudy is not the prudent choice of partner. Not that Vincent had much of a handle on things anyhow. He came to Taiwan as "that rarest of things, a sexually fulfilled virgin." (p. 25) That was likelier a matter of muddy definitions , rather than how things really were. When he got together with Trudy, he hoped, despite the evidence, for something substantial and valuable: "’Are you changed, Trudy? Are you changed by the things we do in bed together?’ He wanted to know because he could not sense any particular change in himself." (p. 143) Trudy, for her part, had no delusions of grandeur. She wanted to experience what people ascribed such importance to, and she wanted to do things right. She had no expectations that her life would change. She looked at herself in a mirror and decided that her naked self was different from her brother’s porno films in that she was "too much real." (p. 130) It’s unclear whether she considers this a positive or a negative observation. Her reaction to kissing is odd and deflating: "’Was the kiss a good one? I mean was it correct?’" (p. 115) That the Trudy interlude would end in shame and failure was perhaps inevitable; Vincent needed to find a setting in which sex was a natural development, rather than a guilty release. For the remainder of the book, Vincent is a theorist rather than a practitioner. He is left wary and unsure of himself, and the sexual component of his slow healing is a hope and an expectation, not a realization. "There’s much to look forward to," Vincent tells Jia-ling, and the reader can hope that sex will play a happier role in times to come.
Is lying bad?
Vincent, despite his travel and his work, retains a core of Midwestern naiveté. He would like to be able to rely on what people tell him; he would like to feel that he is hearing what is, not just what people want him to hear. It is ironic that some of his early schooling in mendacity comes from Rev. Phillips, his missionary superior, who recommends that Vincent present Gloria as his actual sister: "Think of it as a polite falsehood, a way of eliminating suspicion before it begins." (p. 74) It is lying, certainly, but it can be redefined to appear benign, Gwa displays the same approach to truth on a local level. When Vincent wants to know "’why you lied about Ponic wanting to learn English,’ he is told ’It wasn’t a lie . . . but a kind of excuse. An excuse to get to know you. I thought it would be the best way.’" (p. 82) Appearances are crucial and people have to act the right way, whether the facts are in agreement or not. When Vincent is bothered by people talking about him in a restaurant, his shrewd landlady explains how it all should work: "Pretend. . . . You pretend you haven’t done anything wrong and they’ll pretend they’re not gossiping about you.’" (p. 407) That kind of approach is still not what Vincent would consider right. Earlier, in the aftermath of his arranging to leave town in disgrace, Vincent reflects on truth and life: "he found that a falsehood committed to word, as opposed to one spoken aloud, had a graceless, inflexible quality. Untrue words stood brittle, as if anticipating honest contradiction. And while they were no uglier than true words, they reminded him of how often he had resorted to lies recently and how ugly this habit had become. He wondered if a true accounting of what had happened was possible, wondered if he was still capable of such a thing." (p. 175) A curious predicament to be propounded by someone whose trade is writing fiction.
Is scale an issue?
One of the very first things we see in Heaven lake is the impact of scale. Vincent arrives in Toulio and glances around him, seeing "a cascade of flickering signs, a profusion of signs, so many that the great tangle of them seemed to render each individual one meaningless." (p. 5) The lesson seems clear: individuals are insignificant against the backdrop of Chinese numbers. And those numbers are colossal; the most diminutive features are multiplied often enough to wind up impressive. China is far away to start with, and remarkably vast once one is there. The train creeps across a terrain that seems to go on forever. It is a planetary setting that triggers cosmic reactions. Dalton points out the danger of ascribing too much importance to any one thing: "how gullible, to have hoodwinked himself into believing something was one in a million when in fact it was merely one of." (p. 363) That all provides a workable way of approaching the Chinese experience, but Dalton does not leave it there. He reminds us that even viewed through the wrong end of the telescope, "a man’s a man for a’ that." Perspective can negate scale. What is very important to you will be very important, even if it has no bearing on how the world turns on its axis: "wasn’t it a frail excuse to face the wall and say that he’d been lonely? How puny it sounded, though when you were in the grip of it, loneliness was vast, a wide river whose dark and tumbling currents could carry you in any number of directions." (p. 405) What the novel ultimately becomes is an account of an individual coming to grips with his own life; setting the narrative against the backdrop of China merely reemphasizes the final importance of the individual.
Does language clarify or confuse?
Having a novel take place in a foreign-speaking setting is a gift; it allows the author to examine language and play with it in ways that would not be possible on one’s own home turf. It’s a sort of scaled-down Finnegan’s Wake in which the wrong word in the right place can lead to any number of insights that are fascinating and useful, even when they are not inevitable. One bonus level of language comes with those who would learn a new one. Vincent speaks of his students’ "troublesome habit of lifting large, powerfully charged words from their Chinese-English dictionaries and inserting them clumsily into otherwise plain sentences." (p.99) Overwrought language can highlight an otherwise unmemorable statement. There’s the garbled tribute to things we take for granted, such as Gwa’s chauffeur taking on (sort of) the name of his automobile-"Ponic." There’s the alien phrasing that makes the reader sit up and pay attention: "it’s not good because the three boys, they make you pay the too-high price." (p. 4) There’s the inadvertent humor of amateur phonetics: Mrs. Liang announces "My favorite book is American. Have you ever read it? In Taiwan we call it Hah-ku-bay-erh-fen." (p. 43) [Which turns out to be Mark Twain’s Great American Novel.] And best of all is the word that is flat-out wrong, but in whose wrongness can be read many unsuspected truths. Perhaps the best example in Heaven Lake comes from Gloria and her compulsive but limited efforts to learn Chinese. She can’t speak, but she can write beautifully, and all her language efforts are funneled through the opening of calligraphy. She letters a slogan on her bedroom door, a beautifully written sentence about hard work and Jesus that she thinks can be a constant inspiration to her as she comes and goes from her room. What does it add to the story when Trudy (of all people) supplies an accurate translation: "To work hard with a fever and to love Jesus with a fever is the same thing."? (p. 35)
THE LANDSCAPE OF DESIRE
"Vincent had seen this landscape before, in countless Chinese scrolls and wall hangings, the hills ink-brushed or water-colored, rearing up into such lofty, attenuated peaks that he could only suspect the artists of exaggeration. They had not exaggerated. If anything, they had failed to capture the full legion of pinnacles, a piked, ivy-cloaked regiment bearing down on the rice meadows, the roping Li River, the slight wisp of a highway upon which Vincent now traveled." (p. 199) You can find some examples of this sort of landscape at http://www.imperialtours.net/guilin_main.htm "(in the novel the town is Yangshuo which is very close to. . .Guilin." Photographs of Heaven Lake and the people who live there can be found, along with explanatory text, at the author’s website: http://www.daltonnovel.com/HLake.htm Landscape has long been a serious focus of Chinese artists, and many examples can be found on the internet. Reed College presents a selection entitled "Paintings and Nature" at http://academic.reed.edu/chinese/chin-hum/LandscapePaintings/landscape.html The Shanghai Museum has spectacular collections that are regularly supplemented with topical exhibitions: http://www.shanghaimuseum.net/en/collection/collection.htm
Missionaries. A basic disjunction is laid out almost immediately: "The people of Toulio will have no particular interest in Christ or the Presbyterian faith." (p. 9) The Jesus teachers, on the other hand, had a strong interest in proselytizing, with various degrees of aggressiveness. There is certainly an arrogance involved in the process of arriving, uninvited, to give people the opportunity of adopting your church and abandoning their own. All issues of theology aside, it is undeniable that the missionary stance, more often than not, can be seen as just another way of saying "We’re better than you." It would be much more easily defensible if the missionaries were uniformly saintly, but that is hardly the case. Vincent, lonely and baffled, turns randy. Gloria is crazed and compulsive. Neither seems really entitled to the better-than-you posture. Gloria is most explicit about what meaning the Christian God will bring to their lives: "’You can’t live without Jesus Christ. Nobody can.’" (p. 174) It would have been a much stronger case if she and her crew had demonstrated lives lived admirably with him. From his original commitment, Vincent moves on to a condition of bewilderment; he "confronts the notion that there may be no god at all, and if there is the exact nature of this god may be unknowable" [comment made by Dalton in personal communication]. Heaven Lake itself provides him with an epiphany: the unexpected Alpine beauty, the salt-of-the-earth tribesmen living there, the whole set-up. He is viscerally struck by:
Everything that happens in life. The sky. The lake. The horses. The romping children. All wonders. All fractions of an entirety he used to think of as God, as Jesus Christ. Understanding that this new god would never speak to him the way he longed to be spoken to meant a lifetime of partial answers and shady intuitions. He would grow old and die without knowing. What he hadn’t expected though, what the long journey to Urumchi and then to Heaven Lake had shown him, was that you could navigate your life without knowing. Even more, you could occasionally be awed by the mystery. You could sometimes love the mystery as devoutly as the believers loved their gods. (p. 304)
It has been quite a long and unexpected journey for the young Jesus teacher. Eventually he gets things sorted out to where he has a more realistic sense of what he can give people and what he can’t: "He was their English teacher. He did not know which brand of guidance they should seek. He did not know or pretend to know what moved in their souls. (p. 437)
How did Jia-ling wind up with the starring role?
There is a long and venerable tradition of questing heroes being forced to hook up with whole strings of elder sisters before they can work their way down to the young one who turns out to be best of the lot. We’ve seen this in everything from the Bible to classic fairy tales-it should not be startling to find this plot device reworked in a novel. Certainly, Dalton has taken no pains to give Jia-ling any early prominence; she was just "Kai-ling’s frumpish younger sister . . . He [Vincent] didn’t even know her name." (p. 323) Dalton was pleased with how the plot worked itself out. "I love to defy expectation" is his stance, and "I knew the expectation would be that Vincent would himself fall in love with the young woman he was supposed to chaperone back to Taiwan. Then one day . . . I realized that the bride had a younger sister. This gave me great pleasure." So Jia-ling ends up being a sort of afterthought to everyone: to Gwa, to Vincent, even to the author. She has rather a better self-image than people might want to assign to her: "There were people who knew me and knew my sister and thought that I was the jewel of the family." (p. 365) Her sense of self was strong enough that she was quick to resent Vincent’s ham-handed patronizing, well-intentioned as it was: "You think that’s possible-to touch me and say a few flattering things and have me believe it? All summer long you sat in my home looking at my sister like a starving man. And now you’re going to say a few words and make me feel good about my situation? . . . You think I’m that stupid? That desperate?" (pp. 365-366) Pathetically, the answer to those questions should have been a qualified "Yes," but Vincent did have the good sense to change course quickly. Jia-ling, however, made very sure that she did not cave in with any unseemly quickness. Vincent needed to pay his dues, take his lumps, suffer a bit. Only after all that could Jia-ling relent; only then could she hint to her bruised semi-hero: "Keep trying. You may be closer than you think." (p. 448)
How does Vincent turn out?
That we ask the question at all tells us something curious about the novel. What we have is a belated coming-of-age novel, in which the no-longer-adolescent Vincent has to come to grips with life and how it is prepared to treat him. Even before he worked at defining himself, he thought he might be a valuable human being: "Vincent had long harbored the suspicion that he might be complicated and ambitious. He might have the ability to see deeply into other people’s lives and offer them a love and wisdom they might not even have known they were seeking." (pp. 18-19) Christian mission is the vehicle Vincent has chosen; it is how he intends to affect the world. The Christian foundation, however, did not prove to be as solid as he had hoped; often "he was struck by the disparity of how he should feel and how he actually felt." (p. 115) That division between his mind and his heart became wider and deeper over time, and, in the aftermath of the Trudy debacle, it became such a rift that he cut himself loose from formal Christianity entirely: "the pulse of his convictions, his private faith, had grown dangerously shallow, nearly unreadable;" (p. 140) it had to be left behind. The new Vincent was more unsure and tentative, but also more humanly appealing. We watch the beaten Vincent struggling to pull himself together and conserve what little dignity he retains; we echo Alec "I like the new Vincent better." (p. 159) It is a Vincent who will listen, who does not claim to know all the answers. He undertakes his comic opera odyssey, works his way out of his infatuation with a selfish beauty, comforts his imprisoned friend, rescues his damsel from a fate that (even though she doesn’t like it) is clearly better than death. If you had the inclination, you could put together a fairly convincing net of classical allusions and turn the train trip across China into a Joycean romp. This leads pretty directly into what Jia-ling says that people are saying about Vincent as the novel winds down: "Look at him. Always trying to do the decent thing. But always thinking about it too much." (p. 448)
What’s the story?
One of the simplest definitions of a novel is that it is "a long story," and Heaven Lake fits easily within that frame. That, however, is just the beginning. It is not just a story, but a story that is conscious of being a story, and that pays attention to what stories can do. Dalton is not trying to preach: "I don’t write with an agenda as far as promoting some specific idea or belief." Without preaching, however, he still wants to show a universality of humanity, and how exotic dilemmas become familiar once you get past the alien trappings. What fuels his stories are characters and what he can convey of what makes them tick. Once they are in place, what will make the book work is an artful balance of recognition and surprise. He wants events to be believable, but not inevitable: "What I love are characters who are real and keep defying my expectations, and a plot that is both credible and keeps defying expectations at every turn." You have to get the reader hooked before he will pay any attention to what you are trying to do. Once he’s listening, the non-threatening context of a story will let the reader-listener begin to recognize and understand things he could easily resent if they were labeled as applying personally to himself. And there is nothing that can’t be conveyed through a story. Even the Bible is broad enough to cover most of human experience: "every sort of human misfortune could be linked to a Bible story," (p. 235) and most of the happier events as well. When you get around to creating your own stories, the potential scope is practically unlimited. If you can get people to listen carefully (or to keep turning the pages) you are going to have them interested not only in what is happening, but in why and in what it might mean. It is a discovery that Dalton had Vincent make in his missionary mode: "Before one could have an interest in Christian theology, one first had to have an interest in and empathy for, Christ himself. A single well-told story-as opposed to several summarized biblical events-yielded this kind of empathy." (p. 53) Being a story-teller involves more than just being an entertainer, and being an exceptional story-teller moves you toward the territory normally occupied by shamans and prophets.
An author’s tool kit
John Dalton is not only an author but someone who has studied creative writing and who currently teaches it. Here, in his own words, are a number of novels that ought to be useful to someone interested in creating a book of their own. Some will have an obvious connection to Heaven Lake; others are related more to the general craft. All are worth looking at.
Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle -This is one of those rare first novels that seems to me to do everything right: character, dialogue, summation, passage of time, pacing and especially understated but powerful emotion.
Scott Spencer, A Ship Made of Paper -A fine novel about the transcendence and destructiveness of desire, but on a technical level, a great example of writing in the present tense.
Kent Haruf, Plainsong -A remarkable novel in its serious and unsentimental exploration of how people are good, noble, kind. Yet it’s also a novel that’s almost entirely shown so that all the complicated emotions are inferred through scene rather than explained through summation.
Alice Munro, Selected Stories -She goes deeper into her characters lives than any writer I know. You feel as if you’re glimpsing the inner trepidations and contrariness of an actual human being. She’s also master of the most difficult kind of craft-unshowy craft that is accomplishing incredible things without calling attention to itself. Study her sentences and the construction of her paragraphs.
What’s love got to do with it?
It is curious to watch the plot unwind, full of all the predictable components of love and sex and marriage, but with almost no attention paid to passion. It is a calculated approach to love in which there is more analysis than improvisation. "For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love" could well be the sentiment du jour, if we could only find someone willing to step up and say it. Instead, everything is very restrained and circumspect. On a rare occasion when the word "passion" is used, it is more taxonomic than voluptuary. Vincent considers what term would be appropriate to Gwa’s long-distance desire for Kai-ling, and "supposed passion was the word for it, though passion seemed overheated, disconcertingly private." (p. 88) Vincent’s own misadventures with Trudy are oddly cerebral: she is as much concerned to learn about love (sex, really) as to experience it, and he wants to build the whole experience up into a structure that quickly collapses under its own weight. His later interactions with Kai-ling are pretty much in the realm of fantasy and daydream. After time and pain and experience have given Vincent a new maturity, he is quizzed by Mrs. Liang. In retrospect, his affair with Trudy had no real "feelings" (412) attached to it. Kai-ling was more insubstantial and consequently more troublesome. As far as feelings for her: "I might have thought I did, but it turned out . . . I didn’t really." (p. 412) Dalton is not looking at love as if it could provide a self-contained answer. He wants to focus on "life’s unanswerable dilemmas," and what that means, in Heaven Lake, is the question "of god, desire, and loneliness." Certainly, these are issues that are important to love and sex, but they are still a bit offset. They don’t always come up if you are looking at the issue head-on. And that seems to finally be the place which love is assigned: a richly satisfying part of a well-arranged life, but not necessarily that life’s organizing principle.
FURTHER READING:
Oswald Wynd, The Ginger Tree (1977) A well-written novel that focuses on the sacrifices, accommodations, and suffering inherent in a relationship that tries to bridge very different cultures. Mary McKenzie is part of the turn-of-the-century British presence in Shanghai. Her love affair with a Japanese nobleman scandalizes her fellow-Europeans and turns her world upside down.
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1999) A mega-seller that looks at the tragic clash of America (Southern Baptist religion, the politics of expedience) with tribal central Africa. The story is told through the eyes of the missionary’s young daughters and his wife, and the narrowness and arrogance of the father’s reliance on his Bible indeed poisons everything around him.
Anchee Min, Wild Ginger (2002)
The author looks at love and life in mainland China during China’s Cultural Revolution. The crippling effect of the neo-theocracy based on Mao is spelled out in chilling and pathetic detail. It’s an interesting sidelight to Heaven Lake, where the characters-on all sides-tend to be much more opportunistic than political.
C. Hope Flinchbaugh, Daughter of China (2002)
Kwan Mei Lin, a nineteen year old girl in Shanghai, gives a first person account of the oppression she experiences as a woman, an orphan, and a Christian. While it displays the "inspirational" handicap of trying a bit hard to be inspiring, the book is good on what it could actually mean to be a Christian in China.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1873)
Tolstoy does not evoke thoughts of China or missionaries or much of what gives Heaven Lake its exotic presence. Nonetheless, Anna Karenina has its very real connections to Dalton’s work. First of all, it’s "a standard choice for writers," a model of excellence in long fiction. Second, there is Tolstoy’s secondary character, Levin, an agrarian visionary, with his troubled "struggle to understand his place in the world and his own contradictory nature." If this sounds familiar, it ought to; Dalton had Levin in mind when he wrote his own novel: "I tried to shape Vincent in his mold." Finally, as Vincent travels across China in the novel, he reads an unnamed but insistently recurring "Russian novel;" Dalton tells us "In my mind it’s Anna Karenina."
Peter Hessler, River Town (2001)
"A memoir of Hessler’s years as a Peace Corps volunteer in China. He does great word portraits of average Chinese citizens."
October, 2004 This Book Discussion Guide was developed by Joe Sedey, a member of the staff of the St. Louis Public Library, St. Louis, Missouri.
2004 NoveList/EBSCO Publishing
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