There are a number of different dualities bouncing off each other here. East and West, obviously, but also bourgeois and revolutionary consciousness, the nature of Revolution itself, before and then after the triumph and nothing, the kind that is really nothing and the kind that is actually something.
Halfway through I might have complained more confidently about the psychological make-up of the narrator, in part because he’s the only character in the story whose mind in shown to us with the requisite depth. And in part because he is battling another duality, that between being less than his two halves and twice as much as them, which to my estimation makes him the victim of either a chip or an inverted chip, character traits I never particularly warm to, and here they tend to accentuate an apparent weakness in his descriptions of others. Specifically almost all the non-Asian characters are white, middle-aged and somewhat crudely caricatured, but as the novel proceeds to its conclusion, one begins to appreciate how the author has covered himself rather well against such objections, for the entire written account turns out to be a) a confession to a Communist re-educator and b) a polemic about the denial of proper representation.
Some of the dust cover blurb suggests that this is a ‘novel about friendship’. It isn’t. It has lots of interesting things to say about a whole load of topics, but friendship, although it features, isn’t one of these.
Anyway, herewith the second batch of memorable aphoristic observations that I have culled from the text...
Confessions are as much about style as content.
Never underestimate what you can do to your worst enemy.
The anti-American already includes the American.
The only cure for being a bastard is to take a side.
This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall.
The loudest voice in the world is the voice of one’s own tortured stomach.
Happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game.
It seemed as much of a crime to commit a cliché to paper as to kill a man.
What one should never do was to require other people to imagine they were just like one of us. Spiritual teleportation unsettled most people, who, if they thought of others at all, preferred to think that others were just like them or could be just like them.
If you know how to steal it, time is on your side.
Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.
Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.
The only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.
And although some say that America is a welfare state, in actuality it is a dream state.
The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think.
Whereas women could look at us as much as they wanted, and we would appreciate it, we were damned if we looked and hardly less damned if we didn’t.
What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves.
I was the kind bothered less by sinning than by unoriginality.
Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word.
You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you.
Beauty is not needed to make a milieu more attractive. A very ugly object can also make an ugly room less ugly by comparison.
That omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious.
If Adam and Eve had debased God’s knowledge, we had in turn debased Adam and Eve.
She was a professional who had seen the likes of me a thousand times, which I could hardly complain about, given that I had seen the likes of her a fair number of times myself.
The true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus.
People who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed.
And, again, a pair of longer ones...
Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors.As a species, we have never encountered a cave, a door, or an entrance of any kind that we did not want to enter. We are never satisfied with only one way in.
No author was immune from having his own ideas and words quoted back to him favorably. Authors were, at heart, no matter how much they blustered or how suavely they carried themselves, insecure creatures with sensitive egos, as delicate in the constitution as movie stars, only much poorer and less glamorous. One only needed to dig deep enough to find that white, fleshy tuber of their secret self, and the sharpest tools with which to do so were always their own words.
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