FICTION

HONOR AND DUTY by Gus Lee (Knopf: $24; 425 pp.) It was tough enough to be a Plebe at West Point in 1964: 24-hour hazing by upperclassmen “who would chop off your foot and then write you up for limping at parade”; exams in all courses six days a week; outranked by everyone including “small animals that poop in the woods.” How hard, then, to be a nearsighted, full-blooded Chinese Plebe raised in a black neighborhood in San Francisco by a taciturn, militaristic father and a sadistic white stepmother who calls him “pitiful, wretched, ugly” and tells him he was the cause of his birth mother’s cancer. Not to mention a heritage grounded in Confucius’ “Three Bonds and Five Constant Virtues,” and a scholarly, patriarchal uncle who thinks military school is an oxymoron.

Lee’s evocation of West Point (he was once a cadet himself) is riveting, a blend of rite, honor and humor, and his portrait of Kai, wrenched between conflicting East-West values, is masterful. Outside the Point, Kai loves, loses, loves; inside, he’s co-opted to sniff out a cheating scandal. His story does not end happily in a conventional sense, but his passage from boy to man is a triumph.