Waiting (review)

"What were you doing while the poor were suffering, their humanity and their lives consumed by flame?" This question, first posed by Guatemalan poet Otto Rene Castillo and later offered to Kate Banner, an American midwife working in Nicaragua, lies at the heart of Patricia Henley's debut novel, which was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award. How is it possible to go about one's life—to prepare a meal, bathe, sleep, fall in love—once you've become aware that horrific acts of violence and injustice are taking place all the while? Ifs a question Kate faces the night she helps a woman give birth in the midst of a hurricane, only to watch that woman die the next day, leaving her child without a mother. Tired of good works that seem to reap little reward, Kate leaves Nicaragua and her longtime boyfriend for a few weeks' vacation in Antigua. "Ifs a question, once you ask it, you have to ask it every day," says Father Dixie Ryan, Kate's housemate in a home that's become a meeting place for world-weary souls. Dixie's arrival opens the novel, but his significance to the narrative isn't made clear for some time; this is a risky narrative strategy that works in retrospect but initially creates unnecessary confusion about the novel's focus. Nevertheless , Henley draws her characters with such precision that when Dixie returns to the foreground, we remember how he arrived on the scene: questioning his vocation, Dixie has come to Antigua to examine his heart. When Kate and Dixie meet, however, it's clear they've been brought together for a purpose. Though the narrative is uneven, Henley's story is compelling. There are moments when Henley might have trodden more lightly on her characters' psychological anguish and others when she omits crucial information. Still, Kate and Dixie are the kind of characters one seldom sees in contemporary novels—they're deeply flawed but, in that sense, fully human. They make bad choices, deal with the consequences and move on. And Henley's brand of altruism isn't without its selfish aspect. In Kate's concern for Marta, an abandoned child who appears in her home, we see Kate's need to provide comfort to others and the curative effect on her psyche as well as the positive results Kate's attentions prompt in Maria's development. Kate's relationship with Dixie grows along these same lines. As the two of them move toward a physical relationship that will decide the question of Dixie's future, we see both characters achieve a more even balance between the need to save others and the desire to have a life of one's own. In the end, we find ourselves hoping for a happy ending that would be impossible in the brutal world of Henley's novel. More than a love story, Hummingbird House is an examination of the human spirit—what it endures and what it survives. (PJ) Waiting by Ha Jin Pantheon, 1999, 308 pp., $24 Ha Jin's National Book Awardwinning second novel, Waiting, is worthy of all the accolades it's received. Based on a true story, this carefully paced tale of flawed but real The Missouri Review · 183 characters chronicles two decades of unrequited love. The story is set amid China's cultural revolution, but Jin is less interested in depicting an oppressive state than he is in using the politics and authoritarianism of post-Mao China to mirror his characters ' emotional struggles. Lin Kong is an army doctor who, out of familial obligation, married Shuyu, a simple peasant woman. After the couple has a daughter, the result of their only sexual encounter, Lin goes to Muji City, where he is a doctor in the Chinese army for the next eighteen years. His only link to his country home is through the financial support he dutifully provides . When he visits his family in Wujia town for two weeks each year, he and Shuyu keep separate rooms as though they were siblings. The purpose of these annual furloughs is always the same: to divorce Shuyu. But each year the provincial authorities...