Winter Reading 2004-2005
instead of in the guest room?” to “Of course
the [Mao] badges were beautiful, everyone
thought that. Even I thought that until the
Red Guards killed my father.”
Mama Wong sums it up: “Sometimes I
think how many people are bored, and how
we are not bored. We are going somewhere;
we are going, going. I made up my mind
about it already, and I know. We are going
up. You can be rich in money, and of course,
this is good. But you can be rich in story, and
this is good too.”
The intersection of these marvelous lives,
The Love Wife is comic, tragic and filled with
wisdom.
— Josephine Bridges
paign for the future of the magic each man
feels he’s returned to the land.
Clarke’s enchanting story draws on a
deep knowledge of literary tradition and
European history, placing her in the compa-
ny of the best fantasists writing today. Her
England is rife with tales waiting for the
telling. We can only hope she will return
there, soon, and fetch them back for us.
— Molly Templeton
Rich in Story
The Love Wife, a novel by Gish Jen. Knopf,
2004. Hardcover, $24.95.
I
n form and content, The Love Wife is a
staggering achievement and a great read.
Blondie, the only non-Asian among five nar-
rators, sets Gish Jen’s third novel in motion:
“The day Lan came, you could still say
whose family this was – Carnegie’s and
mine.”
Carnegie Wong, Blondie’s husband, pro-
vides another point of view. He describes his
mother, who swam across the shark-filled
harbor from Mainland China to Hong Kong
using two basketballs as flotation aids. “The
week before our wedding, she bought a
Mercedes,” Carnegie notes. “She steeled her-
self for the event by reading over the owner’s
manual.”
Lizzy, a third narrator, is the elder of
Blondie and Carnegie’s adopted daughters.
Asian of indeterminate origin – “soup du
jour” in Lizzy’s words – and born in
Inscrutable Observer
America, the teenager struggles mightily
with her ethnic and cultural identity.
Wendy is the younger daughter, born in
China and acquired with great difficulty. On
the way to the airport to pick up a woman
who will irrevocably alter her family, Wendy
observes: “The windshield wipers keep on
wiping and wiping as if that’s their home-
work and they just have to do it.”
Lan, the fifth narrator, is a Chinese rela-
tive who supposedly comes to America — a
condition of Carnegie’s mother’s will — to
work as nanny to Lizzy, Wendy and their
“bio” baby brother, Bailey. Lan’s emotional
range extends from “For did not Blondie
decide I should live in the barn with the goat
The Master, a novel by Colm Toibin.
Scribner, 2004. Hardcover, $24.99. Short
list, 2004 Booker Prize. 2004 New York
Times Notable Book.
ike a shoehorn, Colm Toibin’s eloquent
novel slips inside the soul of Henry
James, a 19th century literary force. True
to James’s voice, Toibin is a guide through
the inner life of this androgynous virgin,
the epitome of decorum, a man who
“retreated into the locked room of him-
self.”
L
Poised in doorways, observing the enig-
ma of relationships, penning psychological
novels in minute detail, James sequestered
himself from intimate life. Thinly veiled ref-
erences of latent homosexuality include the
poignancy of Henry in the rain, all night gaz-
ing at the lighted window of a man.
The American James (1843-1916) grew
up in a well-to-do, intellectual, eccentric
family immersed in Emerson, Trollope and
Balzac. Because of a geographically restless
father, James was educated abroad. His
mother, in unspoken collusion, cosseted and
protected him from the intrusions of daily
life. He spent days in his tower of thought,
reading and writing. This habit cultivated a
lifetime passion for solitude.
James’s four siblings included William
James, the famous psychologist with a pen-
chant for psychics. Henry’s literary influ-
ences included invitation-only audiences
with George Sands and a London-playwright
phase with Oscar Wilde.
The Master strolls between key events in
Henry’s life that permeate his novels. He
lived abroad, writing about the upper crust
writers and artists he mingled with in
Florence, Paris and London. The powerful
theme of the unspoken dominates his fiction.
James loved and abandoned two women
at critical junctures. After her death, his spir-
ited cousin Minny inspired Daisy Miller and
Portrait of a Lady. She was his hidden self,
“the part he guarded most fiercely.” Novelist
Constance Woolson was his closest friend,
yet he turned his back on her, “retreating into
the locked room” before she committed sui-
cide. James grieved, but their deaths made
him feel safe. His astute analysis about other
people did not extend to self-scrutiny.
James lived in “the shadowed corners,
and all the other rooms from whose windows
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