cover image Watching TV with the Red Chinese

Watching TV with the Red Chinese

Luke Whisnant. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $17.95 (310pp) ISBN 978-0-945575-83-2

This funny, poignant first novel about cross-cultural mores and love (requited and not) introduces Whisnant as a sort of Ford Madox Ford of the MTV generation. An astute observer of American pop culture, he is appealingly honest in recording the ways that people inadvertently hurt each other. In Cleveland in 1980 narrator Dexter Mitchell, an actor turned theater techie, becomes romantically involved with Suzanne, an uncanny but indecisive young woman, as he plays half-willing big brother to his neighbors, a trio of exchange students from the People's Republic of China. When Mitchell's brief fling with Suzanne goes awry and an earlier suitor of hers becomes threatening, the novel takes a dark, potentially tragic turn. With deftly handled irony, Whisnant keeps his plot from slipping into the bathetic. This promising debut's major flaw is in the interpolation of a transcript of a documentary film about the Chinese students, a structural device that is too gimmicky for the emotional complexities of the material. (Sept.)