WAITING

Ha Jin's wry and sentimental novel, winner of this year's National Book Award, is set during the most rigid and doctrinaire of the Mao years in China. Lin Kong and Manna Wu work together and love each other for 17 years, never able to touch, waiting while Lin Kong tries to find a way of divorcing the wife he left back in his village. Hill matches the ease, directness, and seeming simplicity of Ha Jin's narrative, but he falters in his delivery of female dialogue, the undoing of many male narrators. Over the course of the novel's nine hours, however, he falls more and more under the novel's spell, as the reader does, while Ha Jin's hopeless love triangle unfolds in his lucid, unaffected, and wonderfully balanced sentences. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC/JAN 01]