Quotes of the Day

Bring a raincoat, or else get soaked by all the tears in Yu Hua's woebegone novel Cries in the Drizzle — originally serialized in a Shanghai literary journal in 1991, but recently published in English for the first time. In this glum and afflicted work, a schoolgirl blubbers when a snowball hits her; an unfaithful husband sobs at his wife's grave; a bride bawls when molested by her father-in-law; and, in the grisliest scene, a son keens into the void after a canine kills and eats his feeble mother.

The author of four other novels, Yu has earned his reputation as a literary brute, whose characters constantly suffer at the claws of icy fate. He openly admires Faulkner's novels, and the grotesque absurdities in Yu's fiction wouldn't feel out of place in Faulkner's degenerate American South: a teen tries to rape a woman in her 70s to see what it's like, a man tries to pawn his dead father's frozen body, a drunkard drowns in a cesspit.

Much of this gratuitous misery can be read as the blackest of comedy, but there are plenty of other dimensions to Yu's writing besides gallows humor. Narrated in the first person by Sun Guanglin, a sensitive and lonesome soul who's trying to make sense of his bizarre childhood, Cries in the Drizzle stitches together a patchwork of genres — from pastoral vignettes to sweaty cinematic action sequences (a teen threatens to kill his hostage girlfriend with a meat cleaver); disconsolate philosophical observations ("Our lives, after all, are not rooted in the soil as much as they are rooted in time"); and Sun Guanglin's bildungsroman life.

Our protagonist's parents give him away when he's 6 to a burly army officer and his sickly wife who can't have kids and need help around the house with chores. (Why his parents are so willing to get rid of him is never entirely clear.) In adolescence, Guanglin makes it to college in Beijing, but through no help of his original family members, to whom he returns when his adoptive father kills himself. Things only get worse, and the lachrymose novel quickly becomes a caustic indictment of Confucian familial ideals, an exposé of the "deadness of family life," and, by extension, the ills of a charred, paternalistic nation. Guanglin's nonlinear narration may be detached and muddled at times, but his — and Yu's — unvarnished vision of China is a welcome antidote to the slick slogans manufactured by Beijing. "Harmonious society"? For Yu Hua, China is anything but.

• Tim Kindseth