Title:  Shanghai Carousel (novel)

Word count:  74,000

Description:  

Part slapstick comedy, part serious fiction, Shanghai Carousel seeks to combine the journalistic insights of Chinese-themed nonfiction such as Peter Hessler’s River Town with the narrative pleasures of novels like Amy Tan’s The Joy Club Luck. 

Taking place on a single Chinese New Year’s Eve in modern-day Shanghai, Shanghai Carousel revolves around four interlinked narratives.  A beautiful Chinese country girl, recovering from a bankrupt business and a broken heart, tries to make it in the big city as a Mary Kay sales rep. A middle-aged American expatriate, burdened with an unhappy marriage, suddenly sees in China the possibility of fulfilling his lifelong dreams of sex and romance—with shattering consequences for himself and his wife.  A headstrong Chinese woman seeks to end her family’s financial dependence on her alcoholic husband’s brother, a conceited teapot exporter made newly rich by China’s free market.  A young and shallow Peace Corps volunteer, in town for a night of dissolute fun, tries to rekindle an affair with a long-ago lover but instead has his entire value system turned topsy-turvy. 

As these four protagonists go about solving or creating their own problems, Shanghai Carousel showcases a panorama of contemporary Chinese life, taking the reader from luxurious penthouses to corrupt colleges to illicit massage parlors.  These settings are, in turn, populated by a Dickensian supporting cast including, among others, an entrepreneurial Buddhist monk, a mental victim of the Cultural Revolution, a stylish communist redhead, and a racially profiled Chinese Muslim.  Towering above all these eccentrics, however, is Shanghai itself, the reawakened Paris of the Orient:  big, ugly, beautiful, a city of—as one character puts it—“21st-century high-rises and Paleolithic toilets.”  

Read the first five pages here.

Reviews:

Publishers Weekly's review of the novel in the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award:

"A novel that reads more like an elaborate puzzle than a story, this is a beautiful work that demands repeated reads to dig beneath the surface of each tale. Broken into chapters introducing refreshing and ultimately flawed characters the author gives readers the most important pieces of the whole — the characters — and allows things to work themselves out. Each chapter focuses on a different character living out an ordinary day in modern Shanghai, China. The protagonists range from Wesson Liu, a UCLA graduate working in China as an English teacher, to Greg Johnson, an unhappily married man obsessed with his beloved Glamour Girl. As the story unfolds and the characters interact with one another, the author weaves a tale layered with ideas on political ideology and just plain old romance. The stories take us in circles before coming to a head when each character’s life has been changed forever. Well written with unique and original characters that readers will sympathize with."

Status:

Looking for publisher.