BABYLON, SOUTH DAKOTA, by Tom Lin
Tom Lin’s award-winning debut novel, “The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu,” featured a Chinese American assassin on the trail of revenge in the Wild West. Published in 2021, it was as sharp and efficient as the railway spike its hero uses to kill his enemies.
For his second novel, Lin has returned with another reinterpretation of the western. “Babylon, South Dakota” tells the story of a Chinese couple, Hsiu Keng and Lee Mei, who come to America after inheriting a tumbledown farm in the northern plains. Rechristened Saul and Mei, they raise livestock and grow flowers on their 160-acre property. The novel tracks their fortunes over the subsequent decades. If, as westerns go, “The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu” is, approximately, “High Plains Drifter,” then this is “Little House on the Prairie,” a family saga invested in domestic life, the turning seasons, harvests, aging and mortality.
At its opening, the novel wrong-foots you into thinking you’re joining its central characters in a setting of mythic timelessness: “Called to this distant land by the death of an unknown kinsman and the promise of a new life came Hsiu Keng and his wife, Lee Mei.”
In fact, the action of the novel takes place from the early 1970s to the late ’90s. The technology available to the characters makes this clear, as does the fact that Saul and Mei lived through the Cultural Revolution. And just as “The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu” used elements of the weird and supernatural, “Babylon, South Dakota” also mixes in magical realism and science fiction.
Mei has the gift of prophecy; Saul sees ghosts and will end up making a fortune from growing chrysanthemums laced with gold. Their eventual offspring, Mara, is able to talk to animals, and one of her sons will speak the language of birds. Medical care on the farm comes courtesy of a traveling physician, Malachi Owens, who has developed a range of powerful medicines unlikely to come even close to F.D.A. approval. At one point, the doctor’s sleeping lozenges put Saul in a coma for five months. Luckily, the book’s bendy reality suspends all calls of nature: Somehow Saul doesn’t need to eat, drink, excrete or be turned for bedsores.
The novel’s overarching plot concerns a mysterious government facility on a requisitioned section of the farm. This is a menacing and not wholly comprehensible undercurrent that bursts to life near the end, leading to a denouement involving the couple’s grandsons, top-secret Cold War skulduggery and quantum physics.
“Babylon, South Dakota” is a very different book from “The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu.” At times, it feels as if the author has made the perverse decision to take everything that worked in the first novel and get rid of it. Instead of a ruthless central character moving forward on a vicious quest, we have a family in a static location and little in the way of overt conflict. Instead of purposeful sentences and short paragraphs, the writing is looser, forsaking quotation marks and embracing a register that aims at mystic lyricism.
“There must be something dwelling within and yet beyond ourselves; something which encloses us and makes profound the banalities of our living,” Lin writes. But he noticeably skirts those banalities. There is nothing here as mundane as an explanation of how two people from rural China inherited property in South Dakota. The vagueness is deliberate, but it makes the world of the book feel strangely weightless. Running away from home, a character realizes “he had forgotten to bring many and crucial things, none of which he remembered exactly, but all of which he knew could not be left behind.” The cumulative non-specificity of this observation causes you to wonder what the sentence is for.
Rather than building a coherent reality or observing the changes in his underdeveloped characters, Lin indulges an appetite for florid writing that was mostly kept in check in his debut novel. “Each day the world hastens to make itself anew, and each day the world yet remains,” he writes. “Like men drowning, we pull ourselves hand over hand out of the churn of oblivion, and our lives take shape in the wake.” This jars for a few reasons, but mostly because drowning men can’t pull themselves “hand over hand out of the churn of oblivion.” That’s swimming.
Lin does have a sharp eye for the beauty of the natural world, and there are moments of thought-provoking tenderness in the novel. Glimpses of Saul and Mei’s back story in China — including a romance conducted by letter during the Cultural Revolution — light up the book and remind you of the author’s talent. Unfortunately, too much of that is invested here in whimsy and purple prose.
BABYLON, SOUTH DAKOTA | By Tom Lin | Little, Brown | 325 pp. | $30
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