The Banker

This lengthy novel moves between complex characterizations, illuminating insights into China's history and minute, occasionally trivial details about upper-class family life. It tells the story of Zhu Jingchen, a man of humble origins who gravitates to Shanghai and becomes the president of a leading bank before the Japanese invasion and occupation of 1937-1945. When war breaks out, Jingchen uses his business savvy to avert a bank failure. Naishan also chronicles the lives of Jingchen's five pampered children and the influential people with whom the family associates. Naishan's strengths lie in her forthright characterizations--she contrasts the aggressive banker who detests ``milktoasts . . . unwilling to accept even the slightest risk'' with his dreamy son, whom he dismisses as ``weak-kneed, softhearted and wishy-washy.'' In this first novel of a projected trilogy, Naishan ( The Piano Tuner ) skillfully depicts cosmopolitan Shanghai and portrays Zhu Jingchen as the embodiment of the traditional ethos of the wealthy classes, while intimating that the war will change things for his privileged children. (Mar.)