The Fat Years: A Novel Review

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The Fat Years: A Novel ReviewIn the translator's note, The Fat Years is described as China's version of the Brave New World and he points out that Chinese intellectuals are telling him this novel captures their zeitgeist more than anything else.
As for the plot, a group of Chinese intellectuals slowly uncover a huge Chinese conspiracy, a period of 28 days in which the Chinese people forget everything during a violent government crackdown.
As a compelling narrative, the novel doesn't work so well because the plot is more of an outline to hang various "essays" spoken by the characters. Some of the principals will talk for pages and pages in what are lectures about the current condition of China. A lot of these spoken essays are quote-worthy, including a reference to Hobbes' Leviathan in which a "short, brutish" existence compels the masses to rely on a governmental patriarch to create an illusion of security and how this longing makes the people compromise their freedom. This is one of many "lectures" about soft power.
I can't emphasize this enough: This novel is full of exposition spoken by the characters. The exposition points out a robust critique of modern China: consumerism in these "fat" years has become a sort of religion and a distraction as the old-guard elite continue to amass power; China's economy continues to boom even while the rest of world languishes in a recession evidencing that China will replace America as the sole super power; the Chinese government effectively uses propaganda to create an illusion of freedom (soft power) even while it asserts military rule over the people; while there is a group of freedom-loving cosmopolitans fighting for a new China, the masses are still dependent on the old-guard government for their sense of security.
This novel works as a fascinating book of ideas and captures what is going on behind the scenes in China, but it works more as an exposition than as a narrative.
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