Gish Jen, a second-generation Chinese American baby boomer raised in the greater New York City area, often deploys immigrant characters and perspectives in her work, but her overarching theme is the broader scope of American cultural identity, which she has explored with wit and due gravity, beginning with her acclaimed debut novel, Typical American (1991). Reviewed: The Love Wife ( ).
The Story: Jen probes deeply into American landscapes, interior and exterior, in her fourth novel. In early 2001, half-Asian Hattie Kong, 68 and widowed, resides in an iconic New England mountain town. Hattie, who escaped China as a youth and has lived in her mother's American homeland ever since, retired to bucolic Riverlake hoping to overcome crippling grief. Here she has community, pets, and a view, but their healing powers are challenged by the arrival of troubled Cambodian neighbors, chain stores, cell phone towers, failing family farms, uncompromising religious fundamentalists, and Hattie's own internal struggles. By the morning of 9/11, it's clear that Hattie can't forget her past or isolate herself from the outside world. The world keeps on coming.
Knopf. 386 pages. $26.95. ISBN: 9780307272195
A.V. Club
"As Hattie and [the Cambodian family] struggle to bridge their own divide, they come to rely on their shared sliver of experience, of being outsiders among outsiders. Jen's masterful book suggests that's almost enough to fill the gap." Ellen Wernecke
Boston Globe
"Jen's exuberant storytelling is not always able to resist an enticing side trip, and there are times when World and Town seems over-storied. This and her tendency, here and elsewhere to pack her conflicts with cheerful endings--a kind of narrative gift-wrapping--are the only flaws in an imaginatively questioning and shrewdly written novel of our times." Richard Eder
NY Times Book Review
"One of Jen's greatest strengths is her fluid point of view, which she employs beautifully here ... Nothing is fixed for these unsettled characters, who keep trying to build new lives in a bewildering world, and whose victories, when they come, bring not rapture but ‘a defining grace, bittersweet and hard-won.'" Donna Rifkind
Washington Times
"Most importantly, this is a beautifully written novel of wit and insight and great generosity. Gish Jen's novels do not come along often, so this is one not to miss." Claire Hopley
Columbus Dispatch
"The only thing Jen can't forgive is fundamentalism: The story's one ardent churchgoer might as well be wearing horns, and Jen devotes long passages of unlikely dialogue to proving her wrong again and again. ... Her bighearted rumpled novel gives [even the violent characters] room to change directions and find new ways to live together." Margaret Quamme
Entertainment Weekly
"It's into this mix that Jen gracefully introduces some of the great issues of our time: how the shock of 9/11 reverberated from city to town; how lost souls can cling meanly to fundamentalism; how it feels when a chain store bulldozes into a mom-and-pop community, or a family farm finally collapses." Karen Valby
Critical Summary
To date, World and Town has drawn the most consistently positive critical response of Gish Jen's career. Reviewers, who cherish Jen as an often funny and engaging storyteller who creates memorable characters, praised the author for tackling the complicated theme of what lies at the tangled roots of Americanness, an ambition Jen signals with an epigram from de Tocqueville and fulfills in a "thick, satisfying sprawl of a read" (Entertainment Weekly). A few critics had minor complaints, including some digressive, albeit amusing, subplots. The critics concluded, however, that Jen handles her troubled souls and big themes with authority and that her work is at once entertaining, relevant, and thought-provoking.