From Todd Gitlin's review of Ha Jin's The New Fall (in The New Republic):

'Jin's forte is to begin with a cliché of “the immigrant experience” and then, with a light touch, to upend it, or stretch it to the breaking point, or chuckle over it, or recover the sweetness in it. His dominant tones are wistfulness and affection: beiges, tans, and grays. His writing is modest and unobtrusive, not brutalist, not sardonic, not choked with the knowingness that is all the rage in the wilderness of fiction today. He doesn't crash his way into a reader's consciousness, or pirouette. His sentences read like sentences held at a distance.'