THE LOVE WIFE - A WORK IN PROGRESS

It's always my intention to post here at least once a week, but I see I haven't managed to keep that intention too well lately.  Another paver on the road to hell, I guess.  I have been managing to keep posting on my political/personal journal in these busy days.  And, amazingly enough, I am also continuing to read.  Just not able to write about what I read.  As I've said before, with a choice between reading and talking about what I read - reading wins, by a large margin. 

Last weekend I was held spellbound by Gish Jen's most recent novel, The Love Wife.  She wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Mona in the Promised Land, some years ago, and this is the first thing I've read by her since then.  It's even better.  G (my partner) is this weekend captured in the same way by this story of a bi-cultural family in the Boston suburbs trying to deal with a major change in their busy lives.  Gish Jen is herself a Chinese American, and her books deal with families coping with cultural and generational problems.  As both G and I have multicultural or multiracial extended families, through marriage or adoption, we are always interested and involved in this family situation.  We have some faint connection with the problems and joys it brings.

The Love Wife is told in multiple voices, every member of the family tells his or her part of the story, the voices mingle, follow, pick up the thread from one another, pass it on to another view, another side, of the tale.  It took me a few pages to fall into the pattern, the rhythm, but once I did it seemed entirely natural.  It is an interesting story-telling device.  There are no descriptive or narrative passages, and the plot is not linearly revealed; it winds backward and forward, there are asides and footnotes, there is even a voice from the grave - Mama Wong, even dead, is never gone.  If this sounds difficult, hard to follow, believe me - it isn't. 

Don't have time to finish this review right now, I do hope to be back later this evening.  I'm off to Rehoboth Beach for the last voter reg weekend marathon.  Our forms have to be returned by 4:30 Tuesday, to Dover. 

A PostScript, a week and a half later:  No, I didn't get back to finish this review.  You can never step into the same river twice.  Not even on the same day.  The river has flowed on, extensively.  I've read three books since this one, though this one stays with me.  I'm going to give you links to some "real" reviews of this novel, and hope you find the time to read it soon.