RIVER EAST, RIVER WEST

Aube Rey Lescure

Duckworth Books, publishing 25th January 2024

pp 339

 

The best books are the ones whose characters you think about even when you’re not reading; the ones you miss when you reach the end. Aube Rey Lescure’s River East, River West is one such book. The novel takes its name from the two halves of the city of Shanghai – Pudong (east of the Huangpu River) and Puxi (west of the Huangpu) – where segments of the narrative takes place. Told in an exquisite literary yet strikingly accessible style, the novel interweaves the stories of the two main protagonists with aplomb.

 

Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer who grew up between Shanghai, northern China, and the south of France. During her upbringing in Shanghai, she lived in both the colonial-era concessions of Puxi and the futuristic skyscrapers of Pudong, only coming to understand the dichotomies and divisions of the city until she was a teenager. It is partly her unique insight into a biracial, third-culture identity played out in a city like Shanghai that powers River East, River West.

 

The characters experience (and embody) many of the divisions of modern China itself. The novel opens in Shanghai in 2007, and focuses on fourteen-year-old Alva, who is perturbed by her American mother Sloan’s engagement to their wealthy landlord, Lu Fang. Then, the focus shifts to Qingdao, in 1985, where Lu Fang is a lowly shipping clerk who harbours hopes for a brighter future despite being haunted by memories of the Cultural Revolution. With China opening up to foreigners and capital, Lu Fang meets an American woman – Sloan – who shifts his perspective and makes him question his life trajectory. Decades later, Lu Fang marries Sloan, forcing him and Alva together as step-father and step-daughter.

 

Both threads of the narrative are supremely engaging, with settings and characters that never descend into Orientalising caricature or cliché the way many “China novels” do. This is testament to the authenticity of Rey Lescure’s voice. Her writing is sharp, dry, and often witty, with an unfussy empathy that makes the characters appealing even in their darker moments.

 

Of her novel, Rey Lescure writes “Nowadays, when China is always in the news in relation to the specter of global coflict, I wanted to immerse readers in the daily lives and private dreams of these characters – their commutes and supermarkets, their jealousies and dramas, their heartbreaks and desires.” In this, she has very much succeeded. Yet outside of the microcosm of quotidian dramas, Lescure paints with wider brushstrokes a portrait of a country that is as complex and multifaceted as the novel itself.

 

 

Aube Rey Lescure has a BA from Yale University. She has worked in foreign policy, and has coauthored and translated two books on Chinese politics and economics. She was an Ivan Gold Fellow, a Pauline Scheer Fellow, and an artist-in-residence at the Studios of Key West and Willapa Bay AiR. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, The Best American Essays 2022, The Florida Review online, and more. She is the deputy editor at Off Assignment. www.aubereylescure.com