Customer Reviews

The Love Wife

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

So much has been written about Gish Jen's new novel. Yet what has been missed in all the press and in the reviews posted here too, is the depth of characterization in this book, and the accuracy of the portrayal of Chinese culture in particular. The character of Blondie captures to an uncanny degree the dream of self realization that lies at the core of many American lives. The character of Carnegie epitomizes a certain rootless post-modern ironic take on the world. But even more dead on is the character of Lan. As a person who has spent time in China, I am amazed to finally behold a character who thinks like the Chinese I met and knew. For example, she is, like a large number of Chinese people, obsessed by what's "real" and what's "fake." In a country where so much of reality is cloaked, it is not surprising that people would think and talk in those terms. Why is it that you almost never see a Chinese character in American fiction who reflects that? Lan is also obsessed with her status in a way that I recognize from my encounters in Asia. She needs to know whether she is a member of the family or a servant, and is obsessed with the question. A related issue for her has to do with belonging. She is, in my reading of the book, not so much trying to steal the girls as driven to find a place among them. So many Chinese students report, over and over, how cold a country America seems to them. Lan is no exception. And she is obsessed with the question of whether she is authentically from Suzhou, a beautiful place that represents the height of Chinese civilization. Suzhou is where her family came from, but she has been living in Shandong province, a poor and backward area. Which is her identity? I loved the way she is portrayed as having as many identity problems as the American characters. It isn't only Blondie who looks back (to Wisconsin). Lan looks back too. The idea of return is important to her. As for so many Chinese, it lies behind her seeming modernity and interest in capitalism.

This is one of the best books I have ever read, a spectacular and groundbreaking achievement I recommend to all.

When Carnegie Wong's mother, the outrageous Mama Wong, discovers that Carnegie is going to marry Janie Bailey ("Blondie"), descended from Scottish/German immigrants, she tries, vainly, to bribe Carnegie to change his mind. Fourteen years later, the happily married Blondie and Carnegie now have two adopted Chinese daughters and a biological "half half" son, and Mama Wong has died. Their home life is suddenly turned upside down, however, when Lanlan, a 46-year-old "cousin" from mainland China, previously unknown, arrives at their home through the machinations of Mama Wong--from beyond the grave. Working as their part-time nanny, Lan quickly wins over the children, who respond to the fact that, like a "real" mother (and unlike Blondie), she looks like them.

The life of this racially mixed family is examined in minute detail, and the reader sees Lan slowly undermining their relationship with Blondie. Lan tells stories about life in China, fixes Chinese snacks, and introduces Chinese cooking, and the children try to understand and appreciate their cultural and racial identity. In bright, breezy language, each of the main characters develops the narrative from his/her own point of view and reminisces about the past, revealing his/her own quirky personality, offbeat relationships, and search for personal and cultural identity.

Despite the specific details, minute descriptions, and personal commentary, the characters are not fully rounded, and their motivations are unclear. Carnegie, for example, has protected his marriage against his mother's meddling for years, and his attraction to Lan is both baffling and inconsistent with what we know of his marriage. Blondie is a high-powered executive, an assured and self-confident businesswoman, yet she allows herself to be victimized by Lan, offering virtually no resistance, and we never really know why Lan resents Blondie so much. Neither Lizzy (age fifteen) nor Wendy (age nine) is seriously rebellious, yet they inform Blondie they would prefer a "real" mother "like Lanlan."

In the last third of the book, the author introduces several new characters and shifts the focus from the limited story of Lanlan's effect on the Wong family to several subplots involving other "cultural" issues--episodes involving physical abuse and violence, the failure of a small business, and prejudice against immigrants in rural Maine. These episodes are highly dramatic, even sensational, but they feel tacked on to provide a climax of greater significance than the domestic issues which have been the focus to this point. With its multiple points of view, eccentric characters, and humor, however, the novel is lively and entertaining, and Gish Jen's emphasis on cultural identity will strike a sympathetic chord with a large portion of the American population. (3.5 stars) Mary Whipple

I found myself really thinking after reading this book, especially about what I felt were its two main themes---class and adoption. Over and over we see how those who feel they are in a higher class than others subtly make this known, and how those in the lower class are affected by this, and how things can get reversed. Lan and Blondie's relationship really is incredibly well presented. The meaning of family in relation to adoption is also something I got many new insights into after reading this---what makes someone family? A twist at the end of the book especially makes you think!

However, I found the plot of this book quite weak. It seems to rely too much on big shocking events to move things along, or events that are meant to be shocking, but most of which you can see coming from half a book away. I guess plot is not the important element here, though. The book is mostly internal dialogue of its many characters, and we get to know most of them quite well, except in my mind for Carnegie, who never really comes alive for me.

I read this book with a great deal of enjoyment, and found the time to finish it even with a small colicky baby needing my attention! The author has a wonderful gift for characterization and also for sense of place---I am very familiar with a couple of her locals---the suburban Boston area and Maine---and they were very well presented! I would certainly recommend this read.

When I saw that the NYT's tough Michiko Kakutani gush over The Love Wife , I had to take a look. Wow! This couldn't be a more timely novel with all the cross-cultural clashes front page news; here's a novel both about families mixed-raced and mixed-adoption/bio but also about America, nationhood, & the challenges that cultural misperceptions create. The reviews I've seen comment on the amazing Mama Wong, but all the characters are so real they become 'family' by the end. Kakutani's comment that this is a "big-hearted" book is right on; you feel that the author love's all these characters and you do to -- though at times you want to shake them too! And, the ending is a heart-stopper.

This book piqued my interest from page one. I became attracted to the characters instantaneously. Each one has his/her own comical neuroses and depth. The author's style of shifting narrators provides a shift in perspective which made me feel like I had become intimately involved with the characters--as if I had the opportunity to read their journal entries and understand their private points of view.

The Love Wife tells the story of the new American family. The cast of characters include Carnegie, a Chinese American,his mother Mama Wong, his "midwestern white" wife Janie/Blondie, their three children--2 adopted Chinese girls and one biological boy, and Mama Wong's distant relative from mainland China, Lan, who flies in like Mary Popins after Mama Wong's death. In her will, Mama Wong has bequeathed Lan. Lan arrives with her parasol and exotic stories from the mainland. As a result of her appearance, each character redefines who he/she is culturally and personally. This new redefinition brings about huge change in the family dynamics.

Gish Jen brings up the ever prominent question and theme: what makes an American family? Well today, an American family can be everything and anything and Gish Jen clearly demonstrates this sentiment.

Although this book is fiction, what makes it so delightful is that it reads as non-fiction. Gish Jen's knowledge of popular culture, family interactions, history, and attention to detail make the reader believe that she is talking about your next door neighbor.

This book is a winner--you won't want to put it down and you will laugh out loud many times as you become engrossed in the story.

This book tries too hard to be clever. The method of switching point of view constantly, within chapters, is distracting rather than "cute" or "clever" or whatever it is supposed to be. Perhaps if this voice change were perpetrated chapter by chapter (although this is more conventional perhaps) there would be a great clarity and it would serve the reader better. Unfortunately as hard as this book tries to avoid stereotypes, it still offers a few stereotypes of its own. Maybe that is part of the point and an inevitability. We live in a world, after all, full of stereotypes. Characters here are, for the most part, quite well developed-"Blondie" and her Asian husband, their two adopted children and their own biological child (whom they had not expected) and the obligatory racist, closed and crazy "Chinese mother" who tries to orchestrate her son's life even from beyond the grave (and tear apart his mixed-marriage, of which she had never approved). The story moves along well and is quite readable, but there is a series of strange events that occur near the end that feel rushes and out of context (and out of character, perhaps). The twist at the end is something one might expect but it is enjoyable reading whether you guess at the twist or not.

I opened The Love Wife last week, meaning just to take a quick look, and have been reading it in every spare moment since. I was immediately captivated by Gish Jen's beautiful prose, her vivid, unpredictable, utterly human characters and her intricate plot. The novel is told in the voices of the several main characters - Blondie, her husband, Carnegie, their daughters, their mysterious nanny. As I turned the pages I realised I was beginning to think of them as neighbours or friends; it was impossible not to sympathise with their arguments and desires. I love the way this novel is both so completely contemporary and yet so fully connected with the past. And I love the way Jen shows the possibilities for inventing and reinventing the family in modern America. It was with real sorrow that I saw the pages dwindle and finally reached the splendid ending. I can't recommend this book too highly.

His mother hated that second generation Chinese-American Carnegie married "Blondie" instead of a Chinese. In spite of his mother's objections, Carnegie and Janie ("Blondie") seem to get on fine and eventually adopt two Asian children (fifteen years old Lizzy and nine years old Wendy). Fifteen months ago Blondie gave birth to their first natural born child a son Bailey.

Before dying from Alzheimer's, mom arranged for the single Lan, a female relative from Mainland China, to join her son's family. The mysterious Lan seems to have captured Carnegie's attention and shares much with the girls. Janie feels more and more like an outside Blondie with her own family. She turns to her infant son for solace as the other three increasingly turn to Lan.

This is an intriguing look at modern race relations within a family that seems like an anecdote for society in general as complexity is a way of life. Carnegie is an intriguing protagonist as he rediscovers his roots, but fears that will make him seem ancient in America. Of interest is how clever Lan is in using the insecurities of the adopted children, the fears of Janie increasingly wondering if she is the outsider, and the fascination of Carnegie to manipulate her hosts. Though rotation of the perspectives enables the audience to better understand the individual, that device also makes it difficult to follow the plot as no center holds the tale together. Still this is a poignant look that intelligently argues that racial issues are changing yet remain local.

Harriet Klausner

Books about cultural assimilation and the immigrant experience in America have long been literary staples, with the Asian-American perspective being the most recent blossoming. The best of them, such as Chang Rae-Lee's A GESTURE LIFE, Lan Samantha Chang's HUNGER, Jhumpa Lahiri's THE NAMESAKE, and Le Thi Diem Thuy's THE GANGSTER WE ARE ALL LOOKING FOR, are deeply intimate. They maintain a small narrative scope, offering microscopic demonstrations of macroscopic issues while avoiding stereotypes.

Gish Jen's THE LOVE WIFE aspires to a broader view of personal and societal issues - foreign adoption, career mothers, self-identity and self-fulfillment, capitalism and greed, marital fidelity, job (in)security, racial violence, and controlling mothers. Regretably, the result is something of an overreach, a novel disrupted in its last third by forced plot contrivances that overwhelm the book's earlier, more evenly-paced character building. The story's surprise revelation of Mama Wong's machinations from beyond the grave - the novel's central plot element - seems curiously anticlimactic as a consequence.

THE LOVE WIFE ostensibly presents the ultimate multicultural family. Gish Jen gives us the mixed Irish-American/Asian-American marriage of blue-eyed, blond-haired Janie Bailey, nicknamed Blondie by her mother-in-law, and Chinese Carnegie Wong, no doubt superstitiously named by his money-driven mother after the great American industrialist. Into this family come two adopted girls, Wendy (Chinese) and Lizzy (of such uncertain Asian origin she calls herself the soup de jour) and a blond, biological son. Orbiting around them are the emotionally dead Bailey family and the smothering and manipulating Mama Wong, herself a successful businesswoman who has never accepted Carnegie's lack of financial drive nor his choice of blond bride.

At Mama Wong's death, Carnegie learns from her will of a book detailing fifteen or more generations of the family genealogy. It is being held in Hong Kong by a friend of Mama Wong's, and it will be released to Carnegie only if he agrees to bring a distant relative, Lan, to America to be the family nanny. Carnegie does so, only to set in motion a chain of feelings and events that slowly spin out of control with successively worse consequences. Lan insinuates her way into the family through passive-aggressive manipulation of Wendy's and Lizzie's feelings. She alienates Blondie, who feels so threatened by the loss of her adopted children and Carnegie's obvious romantic interests in a "love wife" that she quits her high-powered job and eventually takes even more drastic measures. Events spin ever faster out of control, resulting in beatings, two surprise assaults with a garden pitchfork, a tragic fire, and a heart attack. To paraphrase Tolstoy, this unhappy family is unhappy in its own, culturally unmoored way.

The central characters in THE LOVE WIFE feel surprisingly stereotyped. Carnegie is the impotent Chinese male, emasculated by his mother, a career success in some underwhelming Xerox copy called Document Management Systems who ultimately gets laid off. Blondie is the overachieving, vegan, yoga-practicing, career mother who reminded me of nothing so much as Tea Leoni's hilariously hyperventilated uber-mom in the movie SPANGLISH. Lan is the bootstrapping immigrant climber full of the financial hunger Mama Wong wishes her son would demonstrate; one gets the feeling that Blondie and Lan could have easily lived each other's lives and ended in the same places. Lizzy is the standard rebellious teenager, while Mama Wong is the money-hungry Chinese businesswoman, oppressive mother, and impossible mother-in-law. Friend Gabriela is a goat-owning, New Age flake, Billy is the routine racist lout, and Shang is little more than a psychopathic Chinese yakuza. Oddly, these characters seem to skitter like water bugs around one another rather than making heartfelt connections. They feel strangely disassociated from one another.

Gish Jen's prose and dialogue are affecting, and her portrayal of Chinese cultural tone is wonderfully on target. Lan was born and lived her early years in Suzhou, and Jen taps accurately (if perhaps a bit superficially) into that city's rich and unique cultural tradition. The author uses a multiple-narrator approach in which all the main characters tell parts of the story from their various perspectives. This complicates the story slightly, but it creates a fuller, more kaleidoscopic set of narrative voices, like watching a documentary created from interviews with different family members (a literary CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, perhaps). THE LOVE WIFE offers an interesting take on cultural identity and cross-cultural adoption, but in the end, the novel is outdone by its own stereotyping and pyrotechnic plotting.

I've thoroughly enjoyed Jen's critically-acclaimed first two novels (Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land) but I think this is a huge leap for her. Jen's trademark humor is here, as is her skillful portrayal of the dark side of human relations, miscommunications, motivations. But she lets her characters -- all of them! -- speak for themselves, almost in a radio drama kind of way, which both drives the narrative at breakneck speed but more importantly makes them all sympathetic, even as we see their many failings. (Mama Wong is amazing, a force to be reckoned with who is the most memorable character I've come across in years -- even after she's dead!). This book goes way beyond the sweet deserving immigrant stories so typical in fiction. Jen's portrayal of cultural differences is done with an accuracy (and a sympathy) that I've not seen before. Lan thinks in truly Chinese terms, and Blondie's ethnic heritage and her ideas about self-realization are also dead on. Jen's interest in what makes one American is here as well, but now augmented by concerns about what makes a family (and nation) `natural'. The Wong family, with an interracial couple that both conceives and adopts children, is unnatural according to Mama Wong. What's natural/unnatural to a family, or to America, or to the world, is an important question in these times of rampant extremism and fundamentalism. With The Love Wife, we get a funny, intimate, and provocative view into these questions. This is an important book & a must read.