Dam the Yangtzzzzz …

A quick take on San Francisco Chronicle contributor Li Miao Lovett’s somnambulant novel In the Lap of the Gods: Man finds baby, man finds wife, man loses wife, reader loses consciousness. The expanded version: Lovett’s protagonist, Liu Renfu, scavenges abandoned homes that are being swallowed incrementally by China’s Yangtze River as it backs up behind the newly completed Three Gorges Dam. Liu rescues a forsaken infant. He soon weds a waitress. She soon leaves him. Meanwhile, the peasantry left wanting by the Cultural Revolution is getting screwed again by China’s new capitalists (now there’s a shock) and, um, well, so it sluggishly goes. It’s all delivered poorly, the dialogue’s bad, the premises are unbelievable. An attempt to unravel it metaphorically only led to nodding off to sleep while reading. Perhaps if readers start by focusing on the slow-moving Yangtzzzzzz …