The Binding Chair

Starred review from April 3, 2000
As she demonstrated in Poison, Harrison renders historical settings with textured fidelity. Here she spins an exotic and irresistible tale set mainly in Shanghai at the turn of the last century, with evocative side trips through Russia, England and the French Riviera. The changing culture of China is reflected in the life of a compelling character. Born in 1884, May must submit to foot binding as a child, and thereafter endures constant pain and the constriction of her freedom. Despite her deformed feet, at 14 she escapes a sadistic husband and pursues a new life in a brothel in Shanghai, where she eventually marries a kindhearted Jewish immigrant from Australia who's a member of the Foot Emancipation Society. May's stubborn, indomitable spirit isn't hampered by her husband's inability to find a job, since they live in the opulent household of his sister and her husband, and their two daughters--the younger of whom comes under May's thrall. Manipulative and autocratic, May spends her life despising her useless feet, fighting convention and adoring her high-spirited niece. But she cannot escape the ancient legends and superstitions that shadow her life, or the opium habit she develops after several emotional blows. Lost children are one theme here, and the varied ways people deal with such loss. Another is the lot of women striving to be independent in a hostile world. Harrison describes in harrowing detail the barbaric foot-binding ritual, various forms of sexual brutality, parental abuse and official torture. She is equally deft at social comedy, erotic titillation and tender sentiment. This is her best work to date, an intricately and elegantly constructed narrative about intersections of character and fate, history and chance, and the ironic, tragic fulfillment of hearts' desires. 12-city author tour.

January 1, 2000
A turn-of-the-century tale of a Chinese girl who flees from foot binding to brothel to marriage with a Westerner.

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2000
Harrison is known best for her galvanizing memoir of incest, "The Kiss" (1997), but she is also a novelist of sure powers with a taste for the erotic, the taboo, and the macabre. Her latest novel spans the life of a beautiful, upper-class Chinese woman who is subjected to the ancient and brutal tradition of footbinding in the waning years of the nineteenth century. May's entire crippled youth is dedicated to preparing for marriage, but when her husband turns out to be a sadist, she runs away to Shanghai and enters a brothel. She not only becomes sexually adept, she also teaches herself English and French, hoping to be rescued by a smitten foreigner. Her knight does appear, albeit in the unlikely form of Arthur Cohen, a red-haired, softhearted Jewish idealist, who lives with his high-strung sister, Dolly, her wealthy and generous husband, and their two daughters, Alice and Cecily. Arthur is involved in a campaign against footbinding, but rather than being repulsed by May's misshapen feet, her painful claws of flesh, he is enthralled and ends up marrying her. Glamorous May joins the Cohen household and finds a kindred spirit in Alice, a renegade destined for trouble. Dolly attempts to minimize what she perceives as May's corrupting influence by sending the girls to a British boarding school, a plot twist that enables Harrison to set some of the novel's most intriguing scenes aboard the then brand-new Trans-Siberian Express and add melancholy Russians to her vibrant and enticing cast. Her plot--sinuous, surprising, and rife with crises both ironic and tragic--is compelling, too, although she fails to fully address the questions of fate raised by May's suffering. Even so, Harrison is inventive, provocative, and entertaining. ((Reviewed February 15, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)