 His glosses and annotations combine "the quarter century he tells us he has worked on the novel with the labors of the centuries of Chinese commentators and exegetes who came before him—all of whom he seems to have read—and the dedicated researches and doctorates of his own accomplished students at the University of Chicago (whose contributions are fully acknowledged)".The scholar Perry Link reviewing the last volume to appear, also in the "New York Review of Books", wrote that "Roy can point to a life’s work of enviable concreteness