Review: 'The Secret Talker,' by Geling Yan, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang

A stranger contacts you online, letting you know he's been keeping an eye on you unawares. (Saw you at that restaurant the other night — loved your outfit!) Do you:

1. Block and report?

2. Alert the authorities?

3. Strike up an extended, vaguely flirty correspondence?

There are strong cases to be made for the first two options. Only Door No. 3, though, offers a path to a discomfiting psychological thriller. Perhaps it's hard to believe that Hongmei, the hero of Geling Yan's new novel, "The Secret Talker," would behave in such a way. Or that anybody would. That's fine with Yan. In this slim, tricky novel, she's less concerned with plausible motivations than with the emotions that consume us when we force ourselves to confront our past and our secrets.

But about that stranger. The recipient of his e-mails, Qiao Hongmei, is a Chinese-born woman who's living in the Bay Area with Glen, her American husband. Their relationship is adrift and passionless, and the stranger seems to know it, "messaging her from the shadows and keeping his identity hidden while he judged her, exposed her." The man shares his knowledge about her whereabouts in creepy detail — the "alarmingly sexy beaded sandals" she wore at a restaurant or the tasseled cloth handbag she took to the library.

The nameless man shares little of himself in return. He has an estranged daughter, Hongmei learns, but not much else. But she keeps e-mailing back, both to suss out details and to keep her loneliness at bay. (She's stalled on her dissertation, with few other ways to occupy her time.) She recruits a friend to e-mail him to assist in the investigation, but also can't shake "her slight attraction to this mysterious man" or her urge "to make sure she was truly special in his eyes."

It may help to know that Yan's novel has a few years on it: It was first published in China in 2004. It also may help to know that her chief interests as a writer have more to do with her home country's past than contemporary online mores. She wrote the screenplay for "Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl," set during the Cultural Revolution, and the source novella for "The Flowers of War," a 2011 film starring Christian Bale about the Rape of Nanking. To the extent "The Secret Talker" redeems itself, it's on that turf.

Hongmei, we learn, grew up in a town that was attacked by Japanese troops in 1937. The women hid in haystacks, which the soldiers speared with pitchforks and then set on fire. It's a grotesque lesson in a culture of silence. "The haystacks could swallow any number of secrets and wouldn't let anything back out," Yan writes. Hongmei grew up during the Cultural Revolution, a child of the country at its most repressive. Later, as a military interpreter, she falls for Glen, a visiting English teacher, which leads to accusations that she's a spy. She's compelled to fill a "regret journal" before she makes her escape with Glen.

Hongmei's trauma helps explain her venting to the strange man — she's been trained to think of every misstep as a regret, and it's easier to share so many repressed secrets with a stranger than with her husband. But Yan's tone about Hongmei's crisis (via translator Jeremy Tiang) is so cool and plain-spoken, so detached from anxiety and paranoia, that we're invited to wonder how threatening the stranger is. Perhaps her stalker/e-mailer is as close as the next room in her apartment. Perhaps he isn't real at all. (The identity crisis is coming from inside the house!)

As the novel pushes to its close, full of missed connections and climactic confrontations, it becomes more fully a story about the toxicity of repression than about ill-advised online banter. Hongmei isn't a pushover, but her youth has made her skeptical of everybody close to her. "No one can ever be fully aware of how many plans are sprouting in the darkness at the bottom of their heart," she thinks.

A more realistic novel might have given Hongmei a different way to share her anxieties. But in this one, the tension between her need to express herself and her questionable method for doing so is affecting, even at times touching. An important element of the plot turns on a misspelling of the word "disappoint," which means the word appears constantly in the novel, storm clouds always passing through the story to underscore Hongmei's sense of failure and disorientation.

Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and author of "The New Midwest."

By: Geling Yan, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang.