Forced peace

“The Fifth Book of Peace,” Maxine Hong Kingston’s first new book in more than a decade, is a hybrid of memoir, fiction and (the last term comes less fluidly) writing-group-verging-on-group-therapy reportage. The hybridized approach -- fact and fantasy boldly and often imaginatively commingled -- was successful in “The Woman Warrior” and “China Men,” vivid memoirs of Kingston’s heritage that embrace the experienced, the inherited and the conjectural, and in her novel “Tripmaster Monkey,” which was preceded by a disclaimer (“This fiction is set in the 1960s, a time when some events appeared to occur months or even years anachronistically”). But in this new book, for reasons that take time to unfold, the approach leads Kingston severely astray.

It’s a particular disappointment because “The Fifth Book of Peace” begins so powerfully that the reader at first speeds through it in almost a single suspenseful breath. “Fire” is the name Kingston gives this section, and it is a sharp, aching account of just that, specifically the 1991 Oakland fire that she first saw just as she was returning from her father’s funeral.

Kingston takes us through her once peaceful home landscape, now brutally transformed into a place of smoke and flame and fury, where a ginkgo tree “fountain[ed] up and up,” BART girders smoked with heat and “A red-orange diamond enhoused [a neighbor’s] house, the crystal within a crystal. So -- a house can burn all at once,” we learn with Kingston, and “not be eaten away corner by corner.”

This is an aching journey, full of memorable images and heightened perception, a journey for a highly relatable human quest: for one’s endangered home and possessions, for -- in Kingston’s case also -- the only copy of a manuscript in progress, a work of fiction called “The Fourth Book of Peace.” All burned, all destroyed. All, in time, setting her on new and other quests that shape the remaining sections of the book.

“Fire” captivates, first, because of the splashy urgency of its writing but also because Kingston dovetails into it the kind of knowing, ambivalent asides about her family that distinguished her two memoirs. She ponders the link between her father’s funeral fire and this fire. The funerary offerings seem to have been insufficient. The man is angry: He “wants more -- my book, all my books, my house, and neighborhood,” just as, when he was alive and she first began to publish, he told her, “I have always wanted the life you have.” In China he had been a poet, he had written six books of verse (also lost), but in America he “couldn’t hear the voices so well.” They were loving father and daughter; they were rivals; they were never one thin thing: Kingston the subtle memoirist gives people botched, people blotched, people in the round.

As with her father, her mother. For the funeral, Kingston’s mother had sent the women in the family out to buy something beautiful and red because “[a]t a death, you don’t want to live anymore; you want to follow the dead, loved person. Finding and buying a red object, you leave the black and white of the grave.” But like Kingston’s father, her mother is a mixture of impulses: She is oversized, she leaves “me no room to say how I felt” about this enormous loss. She “has called herself an old dying woman my whole life” and yet “I cannot bear for her to die. Mothers ought to be immortal.” This all too human paradox is braided into the searing word pictures of the smoldering house and, later, its warm ashes, which she combs for remnants of her manuscript and other possessions. The ashes of a house, the ashes of her father’s life: The story of one enlarges that of the other.

Out of the ashes, inevitably, rises the phoenix; out of Kingston’s burned “Fourth Book of Peace” rises this idea for the new one. She will write it “with others, in community.” And in this book she will write -- coax and will -- peace into being. How can you argue with writing, coaxing, willing peace into being? You cannot. These are worthy, commendable intentions, but worthy, commendable intentions can make for surprisingly irritating, earnest and stagnant writing.

One problem may be that Kingston has turned to an elusive and formless model. She was writing a fourth book of peace because long ago in China there supposedly existed three lost books of peace, which were purportedly destroyed in deliberate fires. In “Paper,” which follows “Fire,” she goes in quest of these lost books, talking to a variety of scholars, none of whom seems to agree as to what they were or meant. Along the way she concludes that “peace begins in thought,” that it takes a “long writing-out to make real, its book has to be longer than war books.” She reports that in her fourth book of peace she was “making up characters who use peace tactics.” She tells us that “[a]fter the fire, I could not re-enter fiction” -- and yet in the third section of this, her fifth, book of peace, she nonetheless gives us the apparently reconstructed, unfinished fiction-in-progress.

In “Water,” Kingston revives Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of “Tripmaster Monkey,” who here, with his wife, Tana, and young son Mario, leaves the Vietnam era-U.S. mainland for Hawaii, seeking sanctuary in the nirvana of 1960s island life. While this journey-within-a-journey produces some lovely land- and seascape description, largely it brings out some of Kingston’s most didactic, agitprop-like prose: “He accepted paper plates full of meat except for pork, wrapped with Saran Wrap (made by Dow Chemical, who makes napalm)”; “I’m a draft dodger myself, on the lam and underground. I read ‘The Conquest of Violence’ by Joan Bondurant. That’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite book.” These sentences, and others like them, are sententious, clumsy and heavy-handed in the extreme. One, spoken by Wittman to a lawyer he asks for help while still en route to Hawaii -- “This is your chance to be like Miep hiding Anne Frank” -- is, in its willful disregard of historical context and proportion, plainly offensive.

On to “Earth,” the section in which, in Kingston’s own description, the author “sends out a call to war veterans to help write a literature of peace.” Here, at its core, Kingston’s book is at its most paradoxical and problematic: Again, it’s hard to argue with the hopefulness of a project in which veterans, victims, women, children and nuns turn the war’s trauma into stories and confessions that are often moving and dramatic in their own right. The endeavor is fine; it’s the narrative that falls flat, and on at least two counts. The first is formal. The hybrid, this time, has failed Kingston: This rambling, self-congratulatory hodgepodge of confessions and anecdotes goes on for more than 150 pages without any architecture, plot or mediating authorial eye to help unify it or tie it in reverberative ways to the book’s previous three, already loosely linked, sections.

The second weakness, it must be said, is the writer’s own sensibility. As presented in these pages, Kingston’s voice recalls a sentence James Thurber wrote in a letter, part of his recently published correspondence, in which he offered a rare negative remark about his friend E.B. White: “When he is in one of his self-bound phases,” Thurber wrote, White “is the most selfful of men.”

Throughout “The Fifth Book of Peace,” Kingston is the most selfful of women. Without any irony or skepticism, she describes a dream in which her mother visits her and says, “What have you been doing to educate America? What have you done to educate the world?” Of herself she says, “It is I who have to take care of everybody else.” In the endless encounters with students, many bells ring for mindfulness, and hugs follow soul-baring. There is a lot of worthy meditation and careful listening and compassion, but there is also a disproportionate amount of smugness and naivete from a woman who believes that, with this work, she helped make “myriad happy endings to the Viet Nam-American war.” Even if it were that easy, the story of how these happy endings came about would still make for a confused, bulky and underbaked book. *