CAN an Englishman living in Huntington write a novel with a narrator who was a Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution but now lives on Long Island and is influenced by an obscure American President?

"A first-person narrator is a fictional creation," says John Derbyshire, author of "Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream," a much-praised first novel written, he said, on the Long Island Railroad. "I grew up in the English tradition that it is ill-mannered to talk about yourself. A fiction writer's job is to invent stuff. I put a distance between Chai and myself, giving him a different nationality, and brewed up what I hope is an amusing American domestic comedy."

Jonathan Yardley, of The Washington Post, called the book "an absolute delight," saying it was one of just a half-dozen in the last three decades of his book-reviewing career that "came out of the unknown and gave surprise and pleasure beyond measurement."

Mr. Derbyshire is an advocate for America as a melting pot, and says he doesn't believe in paying too much attention to ethnicity or race. "I am one of those people, so tiresome to the good folk at the Bureau of Racial Classifications, who, invited to tick a box for 'race' when filling out a form, draw in a new box, tick it, and write the word 'human' alongside."

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Raised in a working-class family in Northampton, England, Mr. Derbyshire said his family was "bookish but not educated." For the novel, hesaid he drew on stories of people he met in the early 1970's while teaching and working as a bartender at a pub in Liverpool's Chinatown and later while teaching English in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. The lives of his acquaintances intertwined with bits of his own experience became the core of the novel.

The author, who will be at the Book Revue in Huntington on May 7 at 7:30 P.M. for a book signing, said that although "Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream" is his first published work (St. Martin's Press), it is his fourth novel. In the last 10 years, while working as a computer programmer consultant in Manhattan, he has written three other works.

"While waiting for my agent to try and place a horror thriller set in the East End of London -- my Ira Levin imitation" he said, "I got to work on 'Coolidge.' It was actually written more quickly than the others, and probably with less care." It took about six months to complete on a laptop computer, while traveling back and forth to Manhattan on the Long Island Railroad.

"In the late 1970's, I was bitten by the China bug," he said, "after an extended vacation with the family of one of my customers at the pub who had invited me to stay in Taiwan in return for a favor of placing their child in an English school. I loved Taiwan, it was like walking in a Chinese painting. I wanted to stay forever."

Mr. Derbyshire said a mistake in his Taiwan residence application forced him to travel to Hong Kong, where as a British citizen he had residence rights. He taught for a few years there before returning to England to receive a post-graduate degree in Mandarin at Ealing College in London.

"There are only 408 words in spoken Chinese to express everything," he said. "You may vary the tone on a word, and glue some together to make all but the simplest concepts. It was difficult and fascinating for me to learn, I'm a lousy linguist. I have always admired the written characters, which I find very beautiful. I used to practice writing them for hours."

A teacher at the college in England helped Mr. Derbyshire secure a job in in Manchuria. "It was the early 1980's," he said. "China was just beginning to open up, the small college I taught at had been closed since the Cultural Revolution. I wanted to teach in a small town, rather than a big city. I was probably the first foreigner in the town of Siping since the Russians had left 20 years before. I used to draw crowds when I stopped in the street."

The novel's main character and narrator, T. C. Chai, was created from stories Mr. Derbyshire's students had shared with him. The author described his narrator as authentic, "but not an archetype."

After his teaching contract ran out Mr. Derbyshire returned to England. But he continued to correspond with one of his former students, Qi Hong Mei, whose given name means Red Rose and who is known simply as Rosie; he returned to China to marry her in 1986.

"It was Rosie who found our house in Huntington," he said. "She wanted to live by the sea. We had been in an apartment in Queens for a few years." The couple have two children, Nellie, 3 1/2 years old, and Danny, 9 months.

Mr. Derbyshire, who said he was raised by unhappily married parents, described himself, however, as a big fan of marriage, and his book provides an argument against infidelity.

"Perhaps more than anything the book is about marriage, but not in a didactic way. I refer to marriage when I quote John Donne in the epigraph: 'To enter in these bonds is to be free'."

He continued: "Once you become married, you enjoy a new kind of freedom that Chai doesn't understand in the beginning, but by the end of the book he does. Like the dog he walks in the last chapter, he is leashed by love, trust and duty."

There are no quotation marks in the novel, and the story includes odd bits and pieces of Taoism and Confucian philosophy, folklore, lines of Chinese poetry (the author's translations), ancient history, and Chinese allusions to dreams and ghosts.

"It is an interior kind of novel, taking you inside Chai's head," the author said. "In a sense he is blind, self obsessed. By leaving out the quotation marks, it erases that distinction of what is going on in his head and what is going on outside."

Mr. Derbyshire said he felt a certain duty to find out about American history and politics. An ardent reader, he begin studying the lives of presidents. It was President Coolidge's "very distinctive and attractive character" that most impressed him, he said.

"His humor, his philosophy of life appealed to me, it was Taoist. He believed in the virtue of stasis. A slogan of Taoism translates to "by doing nothing you accomplish everything." The novel includes a quote from President Coolidge demonstrating the similarity: "The principle achievement of my administration was minding our own business."

Mr. Derbyshire admits to sharing many of his narrator's thoughts. The author, too, becomes obsessed with "dead thinkers" from time to time. His latest is Bellini, the 19th-century composer of opera, which is one of Mr. Derbyshire's passions and the subject of his next novel.

Mr. Derbyshire also admits to having become rather anti-politics. "The last time I was politically active was for Margaret Thatcher. I may possess the only Thatcher commemorative mug on the Eastern Seaboard. I don't really understand American politics, but I would have voted for Cal."

And, like Chai and his wife, Ding, in the novel, the author and his wife often sit on their Long Island deck by the light of the moon and recite poetry. A few lines they like from the 8th-century poet Du Fu, from "Seeing Li Bai in a Dream," go as follows:

A rafter glows in the setting moon.

It seems, for a moment, to be your face.

At a recent exhibition of Chinese art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. Derbyshire said he particularly admired an artist's silk-screen painting -- and he said he equally liked the comment on the artist, which appeared on the panel beside the painting: "He was a man who loved seclusion, poetry and bamboo."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32114866)

he's a race traitor and a phony.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32114877)

Dork affinnity to AZN women overwhelms ideology

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32114885)

It's not all that surprising, right tail people interact heavily with asians.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32114917)

“There is something about the Asian girls,” Spencer said. “They are cute. They have a kind of thing going on. If I am looking at my own life objectively, it really doesn’t surprise me that much.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32114945)

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/richard-spencer-trump-alt-right-white-nationalist

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32115315)

he writes about the importance of white people for preserving white culture, and then turns around and has subhuman chingchong offspring

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32114949)

Boy looks like the next Elliot Rodger

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32115021)

I wept.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32115001)

Wait what

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32115010)

lol. Some gook touched his decrepit microdick and suddenly "race doesn't exist."

Stfu limey faggot.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32115208)

The media should treat this guy similarly.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#32119272)

https://www.johnderbyshire.com/FamilyAlbum/Huntington2017/2017-07-31dl.jpg

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3456764&forum_id=2#36703336)