Praise for the novel
“Brilliantly explores . . . our connectedness with each other and our yearning to find a self,” says Pulitzer Prize in fiction author Robert Olen Butler, adding “this novel will not let a reader put it down.”
“A mesmerizing, polyphonic plot,” says novelist & professor at the University of East Anglia’s creative writing program Vesna Goldsworthy, and says the novel is “written by a truly transnational writer at the height of her powers.”
The American Book Award winning writer Alex Kuo says that “With candor, wile and wit, the main character Gordie adopts the personae of the Monkey King who unties this knot of ever more complex intimate and public experiences.”
“Xu Xi deepens her explorations of absence, alternate realities, and the elusiveness of identity in our increasingly fragmented world,” says Pulitzer fiction winner Adam Johnson, and calls the novel “a global mystery . . . one in which every avenue of inquiry teasingly leads to a cascade of connections, insights and fractured possibilities . . . ultimately an intense examination of the very nature of storytelling.”
Fiction author Trinie Dalton says “this whole story exudes contemporary updates on The Great Gatsby’s decadence, yearning, and expat experimentation. Its transgressive characters roam across cultures, genders & sexual preferences, generations, and geographical locations.”
According to historian & author Nigel Collett, “Gordie is actually just life itself, the core we are all seeking but which evades us always, what we want but don't quite know why.”
from the opening of That Man In Our Lives
PRELUDE TO . . .
Let’s say it’s the 21st century (2005 or maybe 2006) and we’re partaking of tea and sympathy when Bino says I’m in love with Gordie. What Bino Realuyo actually says to me is this: girl, you’re too much in love with Gordie. I blanch—there’s white somewhere inside all this yellow, this Meyer lemon yellow . . .
When you arrive in America, China becomes merely a thing of the past. Of foreign bodily feeling. Of the blood and guts and gore of centuries. Of peasant heroes you long to revere but cannot because of famine, delusion and other transgressions, leaving you with only monkey kings and whirling white snakes to worship. Of megacities—Hong Kong, Shanghai, even Guangzhou—that gleam with superior mimicry. Slave to all those imperialist fuck-me’s that they can’t help succumbing to (even you succumb, which Bino knows) because the gleam off that Main River (watch how it swells beyond a stream) is too shiny, too brightly liquid, too irresistible even for us formerly colonized beings who should know better. So you arrive in America because to arrive is to shed the longing for self in favor of the self America confers. Can choose to confer.Gordie was America, oh so beautiful Americana, all that was so easy to love, to idolize, all others above . . . as reverential as this hymn of Cole Porter’s . . .
That Man In Our Lives, released September 15 by C&R Press in the U.S., is quickly generating positive buzz. Publishers Weekly calls it an “engrossing, whirlwind metafictional tale (that) effectively demonstrates the far-reaching effects of politics and culture on the smallest, most personal aspects of our lives”; the Asian Review of Books calls it an “ambitious, witty and generous novel”; The Asian American Literary Review says it is “a novel which celebrates the pleasure of movement, of lawless mixing of language and register, and of reinvention”; The Economist's 1843 Magazine “What The World is Reading” says the novel transports “readers from both her native city and the widening diaspora . . . but evokes a city that all readers can experience as locals.”
Praise from Pulitzer fiction authors: Robert Olen Butler describes it as “beautifully refined in both intelligence and prose” while Adam Johnson says the book is “ultimately an intense examination of the very nature of storytelling.” Novelist Vesna Goldsworthy calls it “a complex and compelling tale of the mysteries of love, friendship, and lives led between China and North America . . . (that) “educates and delights the reader”; author Trinie Dalton praises it as “a story that is technically brilliant for its undulating points of view and diverse chronologies” and urges readers to “read Xu Xi now”; American Book award winner Alex Kuo insists it is “a must read for anyone interested in understanding the merging and intractable financial and cultural intersections between China and the United States, and their everyday impact on their citizens”; historian & author Nigel Collett says the novel “places on the page a time and type of living that no one else is recording and on which we shall look back with some awe.”
Long awaited by Xu Xi’s fans and readers worldwide, this latest work by the international novelist extends the universe of her earlier books, with New York as the perch from which she examines the shifting balance of power between the U.S. and China. This tale of lifelong friendships features Gordon (Gordie) Ashberry, a wealthy, dilettante Sinologist – a.k.a. Gord or Hui Guo灰果 to his two closest friends Harold Haight and Larry Woo – a character in three of Xu’s earlier novels. The story opens in March 2003 when Gordie deliberately disappears during a flight delay in Tokyo. The pre and post fallout around that disappearance informs this drama about the friend who was always around in your and your family’s lives until he isn’t, and how much or little we know of those we think we know well. Originally inspired by John Adam’s opera “Nixon in China,” a large cast of characters traverses the globe in search of this missing protagonist, a Gatsby-ish figure with Chinese characteristics. That Man in Our Lives is Xu’s metafictional response to the Chinese classic novel Dreams of Red Chambers by Cao Xueqin.
