American Book Review

Gee continuedfrom previous page heartfelt, engaging, and particularly evocative when describing how Kiam feels in Jenny's presence, from his showing her a scar to their first kiss, and there are depictions of their subsequent embraces and burgeoning physical intimacy. How the writing is so truthful and moving is all too important because it contrasts where Jack O'Connor's life and ways lead him—we eventually learn of his own interests in Jenny. Whether characters can or should or do cross racial lines becomes a larger concern of the novel; it's well worth reading the entire book to discover who ends up with whom, and why. Whether characters can or should or do cross racial lines becomes a larger concern ofthe novel. Choy also comments upon interracial relationships with a more minorbut still substantial character, Meiying, a young woman also living in Vancouver's Chinatown who falls in love with a young Japanese man. The consequences of their relationship are as moving as what occurs between Kiam, Jenny, and Jack; Choy tells another story of life here through Kiam's perspective that will affect readers and provoke yet more intense thought and feeling. All That Matters is also a novel about the survival and growth of the Chen family. Kiam's stepmother, called "gai-mou" meaning helpmate (for the father), is a younger, beautiful woman who is shipped over from China. Choy creates a compelling portrait of her life, for the reader follows her from her arrival as she settles in and gives birth to three more children. Choy's sensitivity is admirable because he shows the reader, in very tender scenes, how the stepmother fears for the life ofthe first child, Kiam's little sister, Jook-Liang, since girls are often given away or removed upon birth in China. Choy also shows the reader the stepmother's struggles of giving birth to two sons and the pain and grief she must endure upon losing one. What should be admired most ofall, ifone steps back, is Choy's consummate skill as a novelist. He manages to weave all ofhis concerns-^Chinese Canadian history, the culture ofa Chinese family, the events of the world and Canada's reaction to them, and how a young man, Kiam-Kim, can find his place in life in Vancouver's Chinatown—into one longer compelling narrative. This is never easy to do, especially when writing about the past, far back in the 1900s. And all throughout, the prose is graceful, artful, filled with freshness and energy. The writer's mind could not be more insightful, the story always significant; and so All That Matters should be regarded as a rare, winning book, one to savor and carefully consider. Allen Gee is an assistantprofessor ofcreative writing at Georgia College* where he is alsofacultyfiction editorfor thejournal Arts & Letters. Flower Power's Enduring Poet Laureate Kirby Olson Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life Edited By John F. Barber McFarland http://www.mcfarlandpub.com 314 pages; paper, $39.95 Time is central to the controversy surrounding writer Richard Brautigan. Neil Schiller, for instance, writes against linear understanding of Brautigan in his essay "The Historical Present: Notions of History , Time and Cultural Lineage in the Writings of Richard Brautigan": There is a malleable quality to Brautigan's time.... It can start and stop at will; the narrator can step outside of his moment and describe another one while waiting for that to come to an end. ...If history is a chaos of facts reconstructed into a narrative, then so too is time a maelstrom of impressions that are reconstructed into a chronology. It is not linear in and of itself, which is just one model of narrative . Another model would be cyclical; another perhaps modular. Brautigan's is dimensional, molecular, conceptually geographical, with moments placed like coordinates.... While Schiller argues that Brautigan is a leveler oftime-based linear narratives, many ofthe thirty-plus other critics in the volume see Brautigan as directly related to his time and unable to survive outside the ecosystem of flower-power. Kevin Ring writes, "He represented something almost intangible but very desirable, that myth of the literary west coast, when the...