whose linguistic heteroglossia swirls into a maddening cacophony

After this plunge into the thick of a chaotic situation, the novel’s patterns crystallize slowly. The numerous ‘triangulated relationships’ and shifting alliances among Chang’s large ensemble cast establish the triangle as the emblematic shape for the book’s many subplots. These small stories do not really cohere into a major plot or crescendo into a climax. Instead, they spread out horizontally, in interwoven narrative vignettes and mini-scenes, connected by Julie’s free associations. Rather than flowing forward in big waves, the narrative spreads out in rings of ripples, swirling around fragments of reality—‘a bit of time in the pure state’, in Proust’s words. Memory, then, provides the governing logic, with the confusion and complexity of life rendered as experience rather than as story. Chang not only resorts to remembrance for her source material but calibrates the narrative form to imitate the patterns of memory: radial rather than linear, elliptical rather than coherent. At the same time, there is a grain of feminist salt: the narrative voice, especially in its use of free indirect style, sees the world from a young woman’s point of view. Chang, as author, reaches deep into her experience of life and recalls it from within. History, in Little Reunions, is represented through an intensified female consciousness.

The contrast between the style of Little Reunions and that of Chang’s early prose yields a surprising insight about the latter: it was not only its immediate aesthetic appeal but also an effect of reassurance that made the early work such a pleasure. This has something to do with the ‘draping’ and ‘dressing’ effect of Chang’s refined language: like a veil, it softens the abject; like a gauze, it salves the wounds of the world’s atrocities. Little Reunions, by contrast, suggests that at this point of her life, Chang no longer believed in the comforting and affirming power of the aesthetic, or in the idea that no matter how terrible things are, they can somehow be ‘captured’—as beasts are—through art, or that the latter can confer certain meaning upon the meaningless world. The language of this late novel is, in Said’s terms, ‘neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else’, but ‘constitutive’.

Blurring the oneiric and the mnemonic, Chang layers one consciousness over another.