The Middle Kingdom Paperback – March 1, 1992

I personally did not find this book to be up to Andrea Barret's high standards. It was interesting enough so that I read it to the end but I found the main character a bit unbelievable. The Chinese history revealed I believe is accurate however and received more of my sympathy than any other aspect of the book.

The Middle KingdomI picked up this book thinking it would be about China, and part of it is indeed set in Beijing in that time between the death of Mao and the student demonstrations of Tiananmen Square. But it is not really about China. It is a story told in the first person of a woman’s self-deceit, self-sabotage, and final self-discovery.Grace Hoffmeier is unhappily married to Walter Hoffmeier, a noted ecologist, who takes her with him to an ecological conference in Beijing. The story jumps back and forth in time, showing how Grace’s bad choices have been rooted in her past and will affect her future, and especially focused on how this bad marriage came about and how it is crumbling. This lack of chronology reflects Grace's character, as she avoids dwelling on the early parts of her life where she failed to follow through with relationships and plans that might have made a difference.At the core of the story is Grace’s inability to love herself, or to believe herself capable of being loved. She is always escaping her past or fantasizing about a possible future, and some of this flailing and fantasizing is profoundly harmful to herself and others. . The Middle Kingdom of the title is really the present, where Grace needs to learn to live.Well-written, though some of the incidents stretch belief at bit.

I’m not sure why the book begins with the end of the story, other than it is anti-climactic. Central character is a woman who is prone to passivity, but also capable of hard work and getting what she wants. Story is interesting enough, but thanks goodness for her Chinese mentor, a woman who is not very complex but is a survivor and able to get the best possible out of life. As a literary device, the childhood friend, imagined as a grown woman who “speaks” to the protagonist, is not particularly effective. The episode with Hank was totally unnecessary in my mind, uncharacteristically evil even for the flawed protagonist. Also, while I could understand her doing poorly academically out of disinterest, the author sometimes paints her as very bright, other times as not very smart.

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 the stories in Ship Fever unfolds around the life of a scientist. Linnaeus, for instance, is old and entering Alzheimers but can still recall each researcher he sent into the field to gather specimens. A remarkable and moving story!This review of one novel by Andrea Barrett is becoming a celebration of her collected works. I've tried to describe why I've given Middle Kingdom a five-star rating, and I've hardly touched upon the high quality of her prose itself. I'm now such a fan that I'd probably even give a high rating to Secret Harmonies, even though it is the one book by her I've not yet read.