THE LOVE WIFE

Name: THE LOVE WIFE
Author: Gish Jen
ISBN: 1-4000-4213-5

by Gish Jen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 2004

Well wrought and admirably tough-minded, though readers charmed by Jen’s earlier, easier work (Mona in the Promised Land,...

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Psychologically and politically astute tale of American multicultural family life.

When Lan Lin arrives from China in 1999 to work as a nanny for her distant cousin Carnegie Wong, Carnegie and his wife Blondie have two adopted Asian-American daughters, Lizzy and Wendy, and a 13-month-old biological son, Bailey. Fifteen years earlier, Janie Bailey fell in love with Carnegie when he decided to adopt abandoned baby Lizzy; when they married, implacable Mama Wong saddled Janie with the pejorative nickname Blondie to indicate her disapproval of her son’s marrying a white woman. The couple adopted Wendy from China six years later, and, by the time Lan arrives, the Wongs seem happy if stressed-out, with both parents working, unreliable part-time help, and Lizzy’s teenage surliness exacerbated by the minor but real tensions of a multiracial family. The recently deceased Mama Wong arranged in her will for Lan to care for their children, though Blondie suspects her real motive was to provide Carnegie with “the wife you should have married.” As things circle through time via first-person commentary from Lan and all the Wongs (except Bailey), we see the nanny skillfully manipulating the girls and Carnegie to alienate them from Blondie. It’s not clear if this is deliberate, or if Lan’s fatalistic, distinctly Chinese personality simply throws into unflattering relief Blondie’s slightly facile warmth as the product of a privileged white family her husband and daughters feel they can’t completely join. Jen’s eye for the complexities of American life is shrewd, her characters utterly believable as a series of catastrophic events prompt the family’s breakup—with a tentative reconciliation at the hospital where Carnegie is undergoing heart surgery. But the knowledge that “this world can disappear like any other” can’t be lightly dismissed in a novel so surprisingly dark despite some wonderful humor.

Well wrought and admirably tough-minded, though readers charmed by Jen’s earlier, easier work (Mona in the Promised Land, 1996, etc.) may find this one more of a challenge.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2004

ISBN: 1-4000-4213-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.