Ouch !

It’s been a long time since meliorism has been in fashion, certainly it’s not in literary circles these days. Indeed, the very word “meliorism,” once used to describe the moderately hopeful social vision of the great Victorian novelist George Eliot has something of an antiquated Latinate quality to it.

Even when a writer takes on an outrage that could be--or has been--remedied, the preferred approach is to wallow in schadenfreude. Thus, although the subtitle of Kathryn Harrison’s new novel, “The Binding Chair: Or, A Visit From the Foot Emancipation Society,” promises relief from oppression, you can bet there’s a certain measure of irony in it. Oddly, Harrison’s subtitle sounds like a direct response to the title of Emily Prager’s 1982 story collection, “A Visit From the Footbinder.” Both writers refer to the custom, once prevalent among the upper classes in China, of forcibly constricting the natural growth of a girl’s feet by breaking the bones and squeezing them into a tiny, virtually useless lump of flesh that Chinese men were conditioned to find erotically pleasing and proof of a prospective wife’s delicacy. (Peasant women, it was sneered, had “ugly” big feet, useful for walking. Aristocratic ladies had less need for such crude appendages because they had slaves to carry them around on sedan chairs.)

Harrison’s novel, unfolding over several decades and continents from late 19th century Shanghai to post-World War I France, tells the intertwining stories of a Chinese woman, May, and her Australian Jewish niece, Alice. At the age of 5, May has her feet bound by her grandmother, her own mother being too tenderhearted to inflict on her daughter the excruciating pain she had suffered. On reaching young womanhood, May is married off to a wealthy silk merchant who seems the nicest looking of her suitors. Alas, not only does it turn out he already has three wives, he is also a monster who cruelly abuses and humiliates her.

However painful and incapacitating her injuries, May had been ready to go along with the prevailing customs. It is only the egregious cruelty of her husband that provokes her to take charge of her life. Being particularly ill-equipped for the challenge of running away, she bribes the gardener to carry her on his back. She heads for the big city of Shanghai and seeks out the swankiest brothel, where she signs up to work.

The man who will change her life is Arthur Cohen, a softhearted Australian Jew devoted to noble causes. This normally shy man braves the brothel to do the good work of the Foot Emancipation Society but ends up falling for May--and her erotic crippled feet. Arthur’s sister Dolly is married to a Shanghai-based Jewish merchant, Dick Benjamin, who supports the entire family. Benjamin and Dolly have two girls: Cecily, a conventional soul like her mother and Alice, who feels a special bond with her strong-willed Chinese aunt.

May’s story and Alice’s story are told in alternating chapters, jumping backward and forward in time. May’s is the more engrossing. Alice’s centers on an incident that occurred on a train trip taken when she was 12 on the trans-Siberian railroad. For reasons that are not made clear, Alice unexpectedly gets off the train in the company of a grief-deranged Russian man who sees in her the features of his dead daughter.

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The polyphonic effect of May’s and Alice’s intertwining stories is further heightened by swatches of the stories of a mathematically gifted British schoolteacher, Eleanor Clusburtson and a penniless Russian emigre, Suzanne Petrovna. Later in life, the grown-up Alice has an affair with a male Russian emigre. Apart from a stereotypical “Russian” sadness, these two characters are not given much in the way of personality. Alice, apart from being self-willed and rebellious, is also not portrayed in depth. Because nearly half of the novel rests on her shoulders, this makes those sections seem oddly arbitrary. But Harrison’s portrayal of May and her vivid evocation of life in the teeming port city of Shanghai are intensely imagined and compelling.

Harrison is no stranger to sensationalistic subject matter. Her 1997 nonfiction account of her incestuous relationship with her father, “The Kiss,” went a long way toward explaining the subjects of her first two novels, “Thicker Than Water” (1991, about incestuous rape) and “Exposure” (1993, about a girl exploited by her father, a famous photographer). Harrison’s fascination with bizarre circumstances and perverse acts was also evident in her historical novel “Poison.” And in “The Binding Chair,” damage is a central theme. It is impressive to see how Harrison has taken this theme and expanded upon it across so broad a range of times, places and cultures.

Brave and resourceful as May is, she remains, in some ways, damaged and becomes furious with Alice when the latter insists on having her fitted for orthopedic shoes. Alice’s gesture is made to seem somewhat naive: Injury is not so easily fixed. It would not be fair to say that Harrison goes so far as to suggest that mutilation and damage are good things. Nor is she the only novelist nowadays to reject a therapeutic solution as too “simplistic” or “unrealistic”--as distinct, say, from having most of your characters land in the lap of luxury owing to a series of unlikely coincidences. The story’s improbabilities are rendered more credible by being described in a prose style finely balanced between lushness and restraint.

But even in the hands of a writer as capable as Harrison, the subject of damage and its perverse attractions becomes a bit tired and stagy. At times, one feels tempted to view the story from a totally different, say Marxist, perspective. What does it tell us, for instance, that many of the brightest, most life-enhancing moments in this novel have to do with successful business ventures, well-timed commodity market investments and the power that comes with Benjamin’s growing wealth? Or that we are invited to laugh at a pompous British judge who castigates May for having slaves to carry her around? (Yes, she needs them. Yes, she treats them well. But plantation owners once used this same excuse.) One would not dream of suggesting that Harrison has deliberately set out to write “capitalist propaganda.” But it is interesting to note the underlying assumptions which she--and doubtless many other novelists--takes for granted at this postmodern point in history.