Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside

Carroll’s debut novel has earned considerable praise for its quiet, elegant prose and the affecting realism of its characters: a young introverted American wholly at home in the small backwater college in Hunan Province where he teaches English and builds an aeolian harp, the awkward female student who tries to befriend him, and the choleric old misanthrope of an American with a crippled leg, who joins the school and inadvertently proceeds to disrupt their lives. What makes the novel work is its dramatic irony – the chemical reactions that ensue when three peculiar and hapless personalities combine and threaten to… show more.

It’s probably the best novel about foreigners in China, notable for Carroll’s precise, evocative, and flowing prose. Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside follows the strained relationship between two American English teachers during an academic year in Ningyuan, a small city in southern Hunan. There’s likable Daniel, a few years out of university, and then there’s the new arrival upsetting things, the misanthropic older Thomas Gulliard. Tensions between the two main characters build gradually to a series of showdowns. Although the novel is a thought-provoking, beautifully written rumination on the expatriate experience, Hunan Province is not especially… show more.