“The first part reproduces the conventional ‘grand narrative’ of the Cultural Revolution as a time of unrelieved suffering and betrayal,” he told me. “I actually find the second part more interesting, because the author is no longer in control of his narrative. But, you know, we are old friends, and we haven’t really discussed this book.” As he said this, Wang put an arm around Yu. We were at a restaurant in West Beijing that serves the cuisine of Zhejiang, Yu’s native province. I had traveled to it in a taxi with Yu and noticed a strain of writerly competitiveness in his terse responses to my questions about contemporary Chinese novelists: he read mostly Mo Yan, Wang Anyi and Su Tong. No, he didn’t much read young Chinese writers or the Chinese Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, who lives in a suburb of Paris. Ma Jian, the author of the blackly satirical novel “Beijing Coma,” who lives in self-imposed exile in London, is barely known in China. He was more interested in foreign authors; he had recently read Ian McEwan’s novel “On Chesil Beach” and also introduced a collection of the British novelist’s stories in Chinese translation.

Yu spoke warmly, though, of Wang, whom he first met in Beijing in the 1980s and who is one of the very few people he sees frequently. At the restaurant they sat together, presenting a study in contrasts: Wang, unfailingly thoughtful, and Yu, as jaunty as ever. Yet they radiated an easy mutual regard, built upon the shared experience of the tumultuous late 1980s in Beijing and amusement at how significantly things had changed in their own lives since they were provincial students during the Cultural Revolution. Wang seemed to cherish the mischievous — what he called the “jokemaking” — side of Yu.

They had just returned from a trip to Nepal, where they went whitewater rafting together. Yu chortled as he recalled his attempts to hold on to his boat amid the swirling waters. “It’s very dangerous,” he said, “very dangerous.” But he grew visibly aggrieved when I asked him if he followed the Olympic Games in Beijing. The organizers promised to sell tickets online on a first-come-first-served basis, and he tried to buy them as soon as they were made available. But he wasn’t able to get the best seats for the basketball matches and then found empty rows in the stadium whose neatness hinted at early block sales to party bigwigs. “Typical Communist Party corruption,” Yu bellowed, and for once I was glad for the loud Muzak playing in the restaurant.

He fell silent after this, chain-smoking in his quiet but tense manner, as Wang spoke of the Western financial crisis and its implications for China’s export-oriented economy. The stock market was in a steep decline; factories on the coast were closing. The discussion seemed to bore Yu. When I remarked that President Hu Jintao’s then-imminent visit with President Bush was very likely an exercise in futility, he said, “These politicians are mostly a waste of time.”

He perked up only when I asked him what he thought of Zhang Yimou’s contribution to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. He said he felt sympathetic to Zhang, who is often accused of selling out to Communist authorities as well as to commercial interests. “He would have reached the end of his career very quickly had he persisted in making films like ‘To Live.’ He had to live with the realities of Chinese society. And it is different for filmmakers. I can always publish in Taiwan if I am restricted in China. In China, too, the political atmosphere has gone back and forth from closed to open, and I have been lucky in hitting the troughs.”

Later in the taxi home, sitting next to the driver, Yu spoke of a threat to artistic expression in China newer than state control. “I am really worried about the new nationalism,” he said. “Anything slightly critical of China appears in foreign media, and the nationalists are swarming online, attacking it. I tell these angry youth that The New York Times doesn’t criticize China as much as it criticizes America. Basically they are ignorant. They think the American media is always praising American presidents. The problem is that the younger generation hasn’t lived through poverty, collectivism; it is lacking in restraint, its references are very few, the experience is so limited.”

We were moving down Beijing’s stately avenues, past the quasi-imperial grandeur of its postmodern architecture. Yu seemed eager to return to his sparsely furnished study and the room with the Internet. Earlier that day at his home he spoke of how his son, who has known only post-Mao China, would nevertheless witness extraordinary transformations in his own lifetime since the capitalist economy was bound to collapse. Yu barely looked out of his window as he said: “These young nationalists have no sense of ambivalence, no idea of life’s ambiguities. But when times are hard, their attitude will change, become more mature, and because capitalism in this form cannot go on in China, it has to end, those hard times will come soon.”