Reviews

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (Starred Review)

HEAVEN LAKE John Dalton. Scribner, $26 (464p) ISBN 0-7432-4634-9 Sober and searching yet sublimely comic, this impressive debut about a modern-day missionary in Taiwan charts a journey away from reflexive faith and toward a broader understanding of the world and its ways. Reminiscent of the work of Graham Greene and Norman Rush, but possessing a quirky innocence and gravitas all its own, the novel is crammed with heady matters, clashes of cultures, ill-considered schemes and unrequited love. Vincent Saunders, a man with strong religious beliefs, leaves his tiny Illinois hamlet to take a job as a Christian missionary in Taiwan. As the only volunteer in the mid-sized city of Toulio, he establishes and runs the ministry house, while teaching English classes to make ends meet. His Toulio acquaintances are an odd bunch: fellow boarder Alec, a foul-mouthed, hashishsmoking Scot; Shao-fei, the crippled son of Vincent’s landlady; Gloria, a late-arriving volunteer with a passion for Chinese calligraphy and proselytizing. There is also Mr. Gwa, a local businessman, who offers Vincent $10,000 to go to mainland China, find the lovely young girl who has long bewitched the rich merchant, and pretend to marry her in order to bring her back. At first refusing to take the job on moral grounds, Vincent is forced to reconsider after he succumbs to the aggressive advances of Trudy, a wayward teenage girl in one of his English classes, which costs him his job and standing in the community. Rethinking Mr. Gwa’s offer, he heads for China to bring back Kai-Ling, the man’s bride. It is during this memorable journey to the heart of modern China that Vincent comes of age, emotionally and spiritually, enduring thieves, bizarre encounters and false promises from a reluctant bride with a lover on the side. Artfully pacing the series of revelations that rock the book on its way to a surprising conclusion, Dalton revises conventional assumptions about contemporary China and collective cultural views of love and marriage. This is a noteworthy first novel by a writer to watch. (Apr.) Forecast: The publisher is solidly behind this stellar effort, and Dalton will embark on a six-city author tour. This could be one of the spring’s, if not the year’s, biggest debuts.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (Grade A-)

In his spacious first novel, Dalton tackles the sentimental education of Vincent Saunders, a young Christian missionary who leaves Red Bud, Ill., to teach English and spread the word of God in the exotic, slightly sinister Taiwanese city of Toulio, where he and Alec, a surly stoner, are the only Westerners. The beginning of this old-fashioned story is, like its protagonist, modest and without frills. After eccentric businessman Mr. Gwa offers Vincent $10,000 to travel to a remote Chinese province to collect a young beauty he’s long fancied, the book blossoms into an unexpectedly satisfying saga. Vincent’s trials attest to an enduring truth: No one of any faith can lay claim to genuine spiritual knowledge without journeying both into the heart of his frail human self and out into the damaged world. -Karen Karbo

TIME OUT NEW YORK

First novels tend to ramble. They are notorious for gathering too many half-drawn characters into their fold and weaving them through countless subplots. On first inspection, John Dalton’s heavily hyped debut appears to follow suit: Rambling is central to the story’s narrative, which follows a young protagonist thousands of miles across modern-day China and teems with eccentric side characters. But in a masterful stroke, Dalton pulls off his harrowing, culture-cruising epic by deftly plotting the transformations of a journeying mind….Dalton’s account is precise and vivid, only rarely resorting to stereotype. What’s more, he manages to trace Saunders’s developments in subtly unfolding changes. If the author’s chief shortcoming is a predilection for atavistic language, we can forgive him. Heaven Lake resonates with the weight of something rare and remarkable. –Christopher Bollen

L.A. TIMES

The mysteries of Asia lure many young men from the West, and some women too, who are looking for serious adventure. Some think they are running away from family. Others say they are seeking a fortune. Still others believe they are pursuing a noble idea, like converting masses to Christianity. Whatever the ostensible reason for venturing to an utterly foreign culture, the common if unrecognized thread among these rugged sojourners is most often a desire to explore the other side of the world in order to better understand themselves. "Heaven Lake," the impressive debut novel by John Dalton, rides on the shoulders of one of these young men, who starts out with simple and immature notions and, as he endures the unexpected series of events that befall him, becomes a seasoned traveler. It is a beguiling story, told with comic flair. Vincent Saunders goes to a small town in Taiwan to set up and operate a ministry house at the tender age of 22 - seems daunting. The young man, Vincent Saunders, conscientiously establishes a program of free English classes to attract the unsuspecting, and once they are seated in his classroom, tells them about the Bible. Townspeople respond to the free classes but are skeptical about the Jesus talk. Dalton, who lived in Taiwan for several years and traveled in mainland China, has a fine feel for Chinese culture, and his characters reflect old Chinese habits of secrecy, stoicism and paternalism, as well as the modern combination of excitement and uncertainty at signs of coming change. The mixing of old and new, Eastern and Western, often yields amusing results in Dalton’s hands. A Taiwanese man who introduces himself by his chosen English name, Ponic, proudly insists that it is a well-known and respected name, not realizing that he has simply mangled the spelling of his favorite American car, a Pontiac. Vincent’s initial sense of purpose as a Christian missionary, with straightforward and moralistic answers for everything, seems at first to protect him from the quicksand of the unknown. He disdainfully spurns an offer from a Taiwanese businessman to pay $10,000 for Vincent to go to western China and pretend to marry a certain almond-eyed young woman in order to bring her back to Taiwan for the businessman, who himself is prevented from making the trip by Taiwan-China tensions. Yet Vincent’s resolve collapses under unforeseen circumstance, and it makes him more human. He falls for a high school student named Trudy, a quirky and socially inept girl with firm, round breasts and a passion for kissing. Vincent knows it would be reckless to sneak Trudy to his room inside the Ministry House. But he cannot stop thinking about what lies beneath her blouse, and he succumbs, again and again. Once the two are discovered, Trudy’s father exiles her to a boarding school and her brother beats Vincent in a scene that is described in skull-numbing detail. Small-town gossip instantly robs Vincent of the standing to be a teacher of English, let alone of spiritual pursuits. Suddenly the offer to leave Taiwan for China, with a pocketful of cash, does not seem so terrible. Vincent is soon on his way. And this is just the beginning of the real tale. It moves to mainland China and proceeds at an exhilarating pace, with moments of harrowing danger and soul-searching reveries about the meaning of passion and loneliness and faith. Ultimately, "Heaven Lake" offers a touching meditation on the vagaries of love. When Vincent reaches Heaven Lake, a gorgeous body of water in the mountainous desert of western China, he has an epiphany about the meaning of life that ought to be the climax of the book. This is the only place Dalton stumbles, however, and his protagonist’s insight inexplicably fades, without altering the trajectory of the story as it should. No matter. Dalton has an intoxicating ability to infuse simple scenes with considerable depth of human emotion. His characters are richly drawn. His throwaway references are delicate and revealing. In the end, "Heaven Lake" is a winning novel for the way that Dalton lets his characters fumble and survive moments of choice in a wobbly manner that is recognizably human. -- By Seth Faison

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Scribner, 451 pages, $26. At the outset of this absorbing debut novel, Vincent Saunders, a 24-year-old missionary, arrives in Toulio, a dreary backwater of a city on Taiwan, to spread the word of God. Hailing from the tiny Downstate Illinois farming community of Red Bud, Vincent is armed with a fluent knowledge of Mandarin Chinese and an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible (one can throw him a Bible quote and he can infallibly locate the exact chapter and verse from which it hails), but almost no understanding of the human heart--his own or anyone else’s. Vincent sets about his first few weeks in Toulio buoyed by a callow sense of purpose and superiority, having private chats in his head with Jesus and devising ways to spread the gospel among a populace set in their weird (to him) forms of worship. At first he’s not terribly successful. He has been warned by his superior, Rev. Phillips, who’s stationed in Taipei, that gaining the trust of the people is slow work at best, but Vincent feels his isolation keenly. Not only is he isolated as a "Jesus teacher," but he feels the inevitable loneliness of culture shock. The only other Westerner he knows is a Scottish layabout named Alec, who spends his days smoking hash, chasing women and desultorily teaching English to Taiwanese businessmen. Not a match made in heaven, the two circle each other warily, Alec cursing and mocking Vincent at every opportunity while Vincent regards Alec with self-righteous disdain. The best way to attract listeners, if not converts, Vincent decides, is to offer free English lessons to the reticent inhabitants of Toulio. The catch: After an hour’s lesson, his students must sit through another hour of Bible study. Not a bad bargain really, and his mission house is soon filled with students with varying degrees of expertise and interest, including two businessmen: Mr. Gwa and his apprentice, nicknamed Ponic (for Pontiac, after the huge Pontiac Bonneville Ponic cherishes). Ponic, Gwa explains, wants to learn English, but this appears not to be the case as Ponic seems not only dull-witted but completely bored by the prospect. When Vincent agrees to give Ponic private lessons, he is instead treated to a lavish evening at a dance and dinner club and then taken to a brothel by the two. Morally outraged and befuddled by his hosts’ complete misreading of him, he fumes and vows to have no more to do with them. Nonetheless, Vincent reluctantly agrees to a private dinner with Gwa at which the businessman reveals the real reason for his interest in the young American. On a trip to the mainland the previous year, Gwa met a 28-year-old beauty living in the far-western town of Urumchi near the Russian border. At the time the novel is set--a year after the Tiananmen Square massacre--there are no formal ways for a Taiwanese to marry a mainlander, but no such difficulties for foreigners. He proposes that Vincent travel to Urumchi, marry Kai-ling, the girl of Gwa’s dreams, return to Taiwan with her and then obtain a quick divorce so Gwa and she can wed. In exchange, Gwa will give Vincent $10,000--$5,000 up front and $5,000 when he returns with Kai-ling. Vincent, of course, flatly refuses, and Gwa goes away in a dark mood. As Vincent’s fame spreads as an English teacher, he’s soon teaching an all-girl class of bright 17-year-olds at a local academy. And this is his downfall. Through a series of episodes that are completely believable to the reader yet inexplicable to Vincent himself, he and one of his former charges (a girl nicknamed Trudy, who was expelled for her forthright interest in Vincent) are meeting every night on the rooftop of the mission house to fondle each other. The fondling eventually progresses to his bedroom, and when they are inevitably found out, Trudy’s brother beats Vincent to a pulp, and he is warned to leave Toulio and Taiwan forever or face even worse. Funny how getting beaten to a pulp can make one reassess one’s priorities. Deeply ashamed and fearful, Vincent decides to take up Gwa’s offer after all, and so begins an epic journey by train and bus through mainland China to Urumchi to retrieve Gwa’s would-be bride. Dalton himself spent several years on Taiwan in the late 1980s, the time at which the novel is set, and he speaks fluent Mandarin. But it’s not his personal knowledge of the terrain alone that makes this novel so rich and compelling. The book took Dalton eight years to complete, and one can see this in every sentence set down, though not in a labored fashion. At the heart of the novel is Dalton’s portrait of Vincent, a young man of feckless honesty and earnest goodwill, so self-conscious that he often describes himself, and is otherwise described, as fretful. Yet, he’s not so much fretful as self-scrutinizing to the point of self-deprecation. Certainly, Vincent has much to be fretful, if not ashamed, about, but the novel as much as anything shows how possible it is to sometimes outlive one’s mistakes. There’s a certain grace and dignity in that, Vincent learns, despite the fact that he tries and fails to serve two masters, first Jesus and then Gwa. Still, by the end of the novel, Vincent has summoned up a remarkable store of personal courage and compassion to set his compass straight and come to some appreciation, if not understanding, of the mysteries of human yearning. By Robin Hemley. Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

BOOKLIST

Dalton’s debut novel is the evocative, beautiful exploration of modern-day China, seen through the eyes of a young Christian volunteer named Vincent, who travels to Toulio, a small town in Taiwan, to teach English and Bible-study classes. He acquires a ministry house and begins teaching and also takes on a high-school class of 42 bright teenage girls. Vincent encounters many colorful characters, including Alec, a roguish Scotsman, and Mr. Gwa, an elegant businessman who wants Vincent to travel to the mainland and marry the woman he loves and bring her back to him. Vincent refuses but soon finds himself in a compromising position with one of the girls in his high-school class, who boldly flirts with him and then seduces him. When her older brother learns of the affair, Vincent is forced to flee Toulio and rashly accepts Gwa’s offer to go claim Kai-ling, the woman Gwa loves. Bit as Vincent travels across China, he learns more about the country and, ultimately, himself than he expected. Powerful and rewarding reading. - Kristine Huntley

LIBRARY JOURNAL

This lengthy debut novel relates the journey of Vincent Saunders, a recent college graduate from the Midwest who travels to Taiwan to devote himself to Christian ministry. His naive morality and self- righteousness are immediately shattered when he becomes involved in a sexual relationship with a younger student. When the affair is discovered, Vincent must leave his ministry and accept an offer from a businessman named Mr. Gwa to travel to the remote northwest corner of China and bring back his prospective bride, the beautiful Kai-ling. Vincent’s journey gives him an up-close view of poverty that he never experienced in the Midwest and he discovers that the world is "a grayer, more complicated world than I ever imagined." Vincent’s passage from a sheltered, religious life into reality is filled with dramatic episodes and unique characters that make this an exciting page-turner. Recommended for all collections. - David A. Berona, Univ. of New Hampshire Lib., Durham

ELLE MAGAZINE - APRIL 2004

Who in this literary day and age would dare to wonder what keeps us whole in the absence of God without wrapping the question in narrative tricks? But [Dalton] has mastered the art of arriving at the universal through finely drawn particulars: schoolgirls with a comically touching affinity for E.T., or an inscrutable landlady who confesses to a love of Huckleberry Finn. Serious readers who still believe in straightforward stories well told will find themselves entranced by this humbly omniscient narrator who unabashedly loves and respects his characters. - Carlene Bauer

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

[Dalton] has written a novel that lets American readers travel thousands of miles to a foreign culture yet still recognize their own sensibilities in a main character who has taken the same journey. For a novelist, "Heaven Lake" is a great place to start; for readers, it is a terrific place to end up. - Dale Singer

BOOKPAGE

John Dalton’s debut novel, Heaven Lake, is an ambitious compilation of a coming-of-age tale, a travelogue, and a probe into the role of fate in individual destiny. After adding his ruminations on marriage, commitment, and self-enlightenment, the end result is the auspicious and compelling first novel. - Deborah Donovan

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