It should have been a great read, and bits of it were good, but, overall, it rates barely two stars. It started well, by revealing a side to the cultural revolution that one doesn't usually associate with that time of collective madness: the period, perhaps a year or more, when the worst of the "movement" was passed, but before teenagers were sent down the to country to be rusticated. The novel depicts groups of teenagers, the relatively pampered children of officials, out on the loose; their parents were in detention of some sort, and there was no school or university to attend, so they created gangs, got into fights and chased girls (in a rather chaste way). The dialogue was stilted and the fights hammy, but there was a sense of freshness about the settings and atmosphere. But then it went downhill rapidly. Most of the heroes get sent down to the country, where they do unbelievable things (one of them decides to get serious and study, and somehow has access - during the late cultural revolution in backward northern Shaanxi no less - to a wide range of historical literature, including foreign books! Several of the heroes join the army. The depictions of army life are moderately tolerable, but then China invades Vietnam, though that country is not mentioned by name and you'd never know that China started it or that in reality it did rather poorly. However, the book's nadir is reached when the heroes separately make their way back to Beijing. Judging by their ages and what's already happened to them, it must be the mid-1980s, but the things they say and do feel like the late 1990s at the earliest, if not the 2000s. One senses the author knows he's tearing at the credibility of his setting, but he wants his characters to be running about doing the stuff people did in the late 1990s and he wants them to be in their thirties (the characters would be pushing 50 by the late 1990s), so he just makes it up. Anyone who lived in the China of the mid-1980s can only groan at the inaccuracies (did Chinese people really go about talking about "win-win" in the mid-1980s, and where did they find these groovy wine bars?). And by this point in the novel its single biggest weakness, that its main hero, 钟跃民, is simply insufferable, comes to the fore. It was only my determination to finish the book that allowed me to read on through page after page of his extraordinary wit, his brilliant feats of, well, everything, and his bumptious presumptuousness. Ah well, I did learn some useful new vocabularly, and the cultural revolution scenes add to own's sense of that time, but I'd hesitate to recommend the novel to any but the most dedicated.