Yiyan Wang's Narrating China is the first book-length study in the English language on the life and works of Jia Pingwa (1952– ), one of the most prolific contemporary Chinese novelists; it is also part of an ever-shrinking group of monographic studies devoted to single writers today. As the only title on literature in the Routledge Contemporary China Series so far, Wang's in-depth study of Jia is a welcome contribution to the field of Chinese studies. In the 1970s, Twayne's World Authors Series, sponsored by Boston-based Twayne Publishers, brought out more than twenty volumes on classical and modern Chinese novelists, poets, and dramatists, which significantly broadened the understanding of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world and brought these writers into the purview of “world” and comparative literature. Since then, interest in book-length studies of single literary figures has waned, especially in the field of contemporary Chinese literature, though there is no shortage of volumes on such writers as Lu Xun.

Addressing the close biographical connection between Jia's life and writing, and his identity as a “peasant writer” (nongmin zuojia), Chapter 1 explores literary nativism (“the belief and the practice that literary writing should … continue and develop ‘indigenous’ narrative traditions,” p. 10) in relation to the artistic and ideological construction of native place in modern Chinese literature. Recognizing the emotional, cultural, textual, and even pragmatic ties between Jia's writing and Shaanxi Province, Wang argues that Jia's three-decades-long preoccupation with his native place reinscribes rural China in the national discourse of modernization (p. 24). She points out that Jia's pride in his regionality does not necessarily create a binary opposition between urban centers and rural communities. Rather, Jia's writing constitutes a conscious incorporation of both popular and elite narrative traditions, staking claims to a native place that “articulate[s] regional aspirations for national identification” (p. 14)—hence Wang's thesis that Jia's interest in local eccentricity is part of a larger project to narrate China, or what Wang calls “the poetics of native place.”

Throughout her ethnographic and biographical study, Wang details the roles of folklore, local dialect, and popular culture in Jia's works. Chapters 3–5 are devoted to the questions of cultural landscaping, sexual dissidence, and female domesticity in Jia's most important novel, Defunct Capital (Feidu, 1993; also known as Ruined Capital, The Abandoned Capital, or La capitale déchue), a controversial work that has been regarded by some as misogynist and a distortion of history and by others as exemplary social criticism. Wang defends Jia's use of female subjectivity that is “regressive and removed from social reality” (p. 94) in his first attempt to portray an urban environment. While his previous stories set in Shaanxi are “imbued with vitality and energy,” the cityscape in Feidu “is a forecast of the doomsday of Chinese high culture” (p. 50). Wang traces the protagonist Zhuang Zhidie's “soft” masculinity to the Chinese tradition of scholar-beauty romance (caizi jiaren) and suggests that the novel is a necessary “antithesis to the ‘real man’ that had been sought after in contemporary Chinese society” (p. 93).

Chapter 6 examines another novel with a male idler as its protagonist in search of personal identities, White Nights (1995). Having connected the idea of insomnia and the title of the work to the French phrase une nuit blanche (“a sleepless night,” p. 118), Wang suggests, “Ye Lang is the alter ego of Zhuang Zhidie and White Nights is very much a story of emotional and mental survival in a totally alien and isolating environment” (p. 129). The next four chapters analyze several other works, poems, and essays, including Earth Gate (1996), Old Gao Village (1998), and Remembering Wolves (2000), that simultaneously defamiliarize “contemporary Chinese quotidian” life (p. 205) and bring rural China forcefully into the discourses of modernization. The national imaginary of the native place and its symbolic weight return to full force in these dystopian visions caught between the urban–rural divide.

Based on Wang's doctoral thesis (University of Sydney), Narrating China provides students and scholars with useful guidance on the world of a dynamic writer. The book also has several useful features, including a twenty-page transcript of Wang's in-depth interview with Jia (an extremely valuable document), two chapters (2 and 10) with in-depth biographical information that is essential to understanding Jia's works, an annotated English–Chinese bilingual chronology of Jia's publications that divides his literary career into five major periods (a classroom-friendly feature), a separate chronological list of Jia's autobiographical writings and critical biographies (a useful research tool), and a comprehensive bibliography of Jia's works including editions issued in Taiwan and Hong Kong (such as Baiye and White Nights).