CHINESE BOXES.('The Crazed')(Book Review)

There's an early Ha Jin story about a soldier who falls in love with a wireless operator solely on the basis of her telegraphic style. He's afraid she'll never be interested in a man like him: "His wrists were thick, and his square thumbs always embarrassed him. But everybody was impressed by the beautiful long lashes above his froggy eyes." Ha Jin's empathy for his characters is matched by his unwillingness to give them a break. Reading him is almost like falling in love: you experience anxiety, profound self-consciousness, and an uncomfortable sensitivity to the world--and somehow it's a pleasure.

Ha Jin's third novel, "The Crazed" (Pantheon; $24), like much of his earlier work, is a complicated web of human attachments; he traps his characters in impossible situations, and leaves them there to squirm. The narrator, Jian Wan, is a student of literature in a provincial university whose mentor, Professor Yang, suffers a stroke in the spring of 1989. Because Jian is engaged to the professor's daughter--a student in Beijing who writes to him about the gathering democracy protests there--he is asked to keep his teacher company in the afternoons. As Jian sits in the hospital room, Professor Yang slowly goes mad--conducting imaginary conversations, spilling his own secrets, and giving his student an education he's not sure he wants.

Like the Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, Ha Jin left China in the mid-eighties, and both writers' fiction has explored the place of intellectuals in a tightly controlled society. In contrast to Gao Xingjian, whose work is in Chinese and whose style places him in the tricky category of "experimental" writers, Ha Jin writes in English, with a deadpan hyperrealism. As Professor Yang bitterly laments his marriage and his chosen vocation--the entire substance of his life--Jian thinks absently, "Perhaps he should be treated by a psychiatrist; acupuncture or acupressure might help him too." Ha Jin's narrators often have a dense, logy air, as if they'd just woken up into the world and are blinking in its strong light. The quality stems from the author's brand of blunt observation: "I patted his back for a while to relieve his gasping. Then I began laying him down slowly. The muscles on his face twitched and twitched as though something were biting him in his mouth. I too was sick at heart." The progression of physical details saves the final sentiment from cliche; like the best realist writers, Ha Jin sneaks emotional power into the plainest declarative sentences.

Ha Jin's talent for ambivalence--for beautiful lashes fringing froggy eyes--may explain why he's so good at chronicling infidelity. Despite Jian's devotion to his fiancee, he has a crush on an older graduate student, named Weiya Su. Unhappily, he soon figures out that Professor Yang--who has been murmuring half-lucid endearments to a young woman with nipples "like coffee candy"--has been having an affair with the same girl. Jian is forced to watch as Weiya visits her lover in the hospital, bringing him an expensive, out-of-season watermelon: "She had fed him! She didn't even bother to conceal their relationship. I was touched and upset at the same time. A feeling of isolation overcame me, as though she had been the only person I could turn to for a bit of solace, but she too had gone beyond my reach." That sense--of having lost something before actually experiencing it--recurs in Ha Jin's work. His previous novel, "Waiting," for which he won the National Book Award in 1999, describes a man who spends eighteen years trying to leave his wife; finally, he marries his lover, and nothing changes. In that novel, which alternates between a village and an urban hospital, Ha Jin explores an ...