New Orleans Writers Workshop co-founder Allison Alsup’s debut novel is a brilliantly paced work of historical fiction set during World War I along the Yangtze River in war-torn China. The book is based on factual accounts of the mysterious disappearance of the intrepid explorer Frank Meyer, the namesake of the Meyer lemon.
Though Meyer makes a couple of brief appearances in the story, the plot actually revolves around the life of a psychologically challenged United States vice counsel and the numerous people in his orbit. It moves between the small outpost of Nanking, where Samuel Sokobin, recently promoted and transferred from the cosmopolitan port city of Shanghai, has a small office, and even smaller outposts on the frontier of the Chinese interior.
The characters Alsup has created, Sokobin is very loosely based on a real person, are indelibly crafted down to their individual tics, habits and personality traits. She explores each of their psyches by getting deep into their family histories and motivations or lack thereof.
The book includes an “Author’s Note” indicating that some of the views and terms present in the book may be found offensive given her efforts to maintain historical verisimilitude. But this seems unnecessary as some of the less appealing characters exhibit temperamental qualities as common today as they have been throughout history.
Though there are certainly misogynists, racists and antisemites in the book, I suspect that not much as really changed about human nature. Some of us in this era just manage to hide it better.
Alsup’s writing style is winningly unique. She comes up with metaphors that inventively reflect the era and descriptions so evocative, the reader feels the June humidity in early 20th century, pre-airconditioned China and tastes the cool tea that Sokobin’s secretary brings to him like a doting mother to an overheated child.
In many ways, Sokobin’s insecurities are childlike, yet his worries, about the task at hand of retrieving Meyer, dead or alive, and wondering about the whereabouts of his beloved younger brother—a pilot seemingly lost as sea in Europe—are very adult indeed. Alsup skillfully plumbs the depths of his consciousness putting the reader intimately into his shoes.
Though psychological nuances are plentiful in all the characters including the main Chinese one, Mr. Lin, a translator who initially comes off as stereotypically inscrutable, the book is filled with action. Alsup puts the reader deep into settings that evoke the period unmistakably including a tiny fishing village Sokobin and Lin visit to try to locate Meyer.
Their interactions with an overwhelmed government officer and the fishermen who inhabit the provincial setting are fraught with the barriers of race, class and language. The tension is palpable.
Foreign Seed came out last year. It received some local press in New Orleans, was featured in the Martha’s Vineyard Times and was a finalist for an award for a debut novel. Yet for a work of such depth and vision, it seems overlooked by the national press. I read it in one sitting and think someone should make it into a major motion picture. It’s just that good.