A thriller fiction book

Review by Chauncey Mabe, Books Editor of the Sun Sentinel
Posted June 11, 2007

It's not every day that a writer grows bold enough to attempt the creation of an entirely new category of popular fiction. But that is the task Arthur Rosenfeld, crime novelist and tai chi master, has set for himself with his ninth novel, The Cutting Season.

"It's like saying you're introducing a new line of cars to compete with Chevy and Ford," Rosenfeld says, laughing. "Remember what happened to the Tucker."

The story of a Fort Lauderdale surgeon who questions his own sanity after a ghost shows up claiming he's the reincarnation of a Chinese warrior, The Cutting Season is a self-conscious attempt to bring a traditional Asian martial arts genre known as wu xia to American readers.

"The trick is to transliterate and transplant a quintessentially Asian category of fiction to these shores in a way that is compelling and meaningful in more than a chop-socky fashion," Rosenfeld says.

Rosenfeld, a student and teacher of martial arts for more than 30 years, explains that wu xia is a venerable Chinese genre with a tradition extending back nearly 1,000 years. The 15 novels of its foremost modern practitioner, Louis Cha, have sold more than 300 million copies in Asia.

"I hope it's not construed as arrogant when I say I'm creating a new category," says Rosenfeld, sitting in the living room of his Pompano Beach house near the Hillsboro Inlet. "People think there have been plenty of writers using Asian themes and settings."

And they're right, Rosenfeld acknowledges. Indeed, he's enjoyed works by the likes of James Clavell (Shogun), Eric Van Lustbader (The Ninja), Trevanian (Shibumi), Barry Eisler (The Last Assassin) and others whose novels include martial arts themes.

"What they've done is take a western category, the thriller or the historical novel, and set it over there," Rosenfeld says. "I'm trying to do the opposite, take an essentially Asian literary structure and bring it over here."

Rosenfeld began casting about for a new direction in his fiction after the disappointing reaction to his last novel, Diamond Eye (2001), a conventional law enforcement thriller featuring a postal inspector based in Miami.

Diamond Eye seemed like it had everything going for it -- it opened the door on a powerful federal police agency seldom seen in popular fiction -- but it was clichéd compared to Rosenfeld's stellar previous novel, A Cure For Gravity (2000), which combined magical realism with elements of the crime yarn and the road trip story.

Reviews for Diamond Eye were mixed, and Rosenfeld didn't think his publisher had adequately promoted the book.

For his next novel, Rosenfeld first tinkered with unpublished manuscripts he had written in the early 1990s, trying to infuse them with some of the Eastern philosophy he'd picked up from the practice of tai chi.

"I made some stabs at creating something different and new," says Rosenfeld, who majored in Russian literature at Yale and studied with former Esquire fiction editor and revered writing guru Gordon Lish. "Then it occurred to me the most influential and fun fiction for me, the thing I'd always enjoyed reading the best, was tales from the East."

During this period Rosenfeld, who had worked in the pharmaceutical industry before turning to writing full-time, also produced a nonfiction book, The Truth About Chronic Pain, which sold well and is now used in some medical and nursing schools as pain management becomes a hot topic. The Cutting Season blends Rosenfeld's interests -- it's part medical thriller, part superhero origin story, part martial arts novel.

"The tai chi I practice and teach is not the New Age tai chi, not the feel-good tai chi of elderly people in the park," Rosenfeld says. "It's the real, nitty-gritty martial art, which is very hard to find anymore, not only here, but also in China."

Rosenfeld, who will turn 50 on Sunday, first came to martial arts in his early 20s, studying with commercial karate and kung-fu schools that he now derisively refers to as "strip mall academies." After the initial fascination with being able to win fights in bars, he found himself drawn beyond the kicking and punching to "a succession of more authentic and original Asian arts."

"Eventually I found the ultimate one, tai chi, which is the one most intimately linked to the deep Asian philosophies of Taoism and Buddhism," Rosenfeld says.

The Cutting Season's narrative displays an impressive knowledge not just of martial arts, but medicine, motorcycles and sword making as well. It also captures the flavor of contemporary Fort Lauderdale as few novels before it, building to a climax during a storm local readers will recognize from recent hurricane seasons.

To publish The Cutting Season, Rosenfeld turned from traditional New York houses to YMAA, a niche publisher specializing in martial arts instructional books. Publisher David Ripianzi admits it's a costly gamble for a small outfit that's done very well publishing six to eight books a year for a specialized nonfiction market.

"I've always had the fancy to do a novel," said Ripianzi, just back in his New Hampshire office after touting The Cutting Season at BookExpo America, the annual booksellers convention, held recently in New York. "We talked about it at the conference table over the years."

Ripianzi is so committed to Rosenfeld's new work that he's not only publishing The Cutting Season this summer, but he's coming out with a related novel, The Crocodile and the Crane, in the fall, followed by a sequel to The Cutting Season.

The strategy is to gain maximum recognition for Rosenfeld's foray into a new category of popular fiction as fast as possible. Ripianzi says he was gratified by booksellers' reactions in New York, where weary conventioneers "stopped dead in their tracks" to pick up display copies of The Cutting Season and The Crocodile and Crane. Some, he says, started reading on the spot.

Rosenfeld says he turned down a more lucrative offer from a New York publisher, in part because Ripianzi, a fellow martial artist (he practices qigong, a discipline with similarities to both tai chi and yoga, but from a different tradition), shares his values and principles. They agree the novels should not only entertain, but also convey subtle lessons.

"In the writing I wrestled with a number of issues," Rosenfeld says. "How to take themes out of a different culture, tweak them or dress them up in such a way people think it's just another good literary thriller, and yet at the same time they'll subtly receive a whole different set of messages about the world and culture and traditions.

"My former literary agent took one look at the manuscript for The Cutting Season and told me it was the book I was born to write," Rosenfeld adds. "I don't think he was wrong."