“The Kitchen God’s Wife.” By Amy Tan. 416 pages. Putnam. $21.95.
Simply the fact that she has written it, published it and apparently survived with her sanity ought to qualify Amy Tan’s second novel for some sort of literary prize, maybe the Agatha Christie Award in memory of a writer who kept her sights fixed on the next book straight through 96 of them. After the huge success of Tan’s best-selling first novel, “The Joy Luck Club,” which critics called “wonderful,” “mesmerizing,” “powerful” and “brilliant,” Tan herself has said she floundered anxiously for nearly a year trying to start a second. The publishing world has been anxious, too. Book sales are in a dire slump, and the industry is counting on Tan’s new book to electrify the public the way her first novel did, thus drawing crowds back into the bookstores. It’s too soon to tell, but early signs are encouraging: “The Kitchen God’s Wife” is winning rave reviews, often a prelude to big sales. In a sense, the raves are justified. Tan’s second novel proves exactly what her first novel did, namely that she is a wonderful writer with a rare power to touch the heart. And yet. that’s all it proves. What we don’t see in “The Kitchen God’s Wife” is anything we didn’t see in “The Joy Luck Club.”
In “The Kitchen God’s Wife” - the title refers to a minor deity who must be propitiated despite his unpleasant nature - Tan returns to the richly textured world she began to explore in the earlier book, the world of California’s immigrant Chinese. The family she describes is a different one, but once again the tension in the novel is between mothers and daughters, and once again their emotional struggles are framed by a mother’s remembered journey through decades of upheaval in 20th-century China. At the center of “The Kitchen God’s Wife” is an absorbing narrative of Winnie Louie’s life, which she tells - or offers - as a gift to her daughter Pearl. Much happens in the telling: long-held secrets are revealed, and a family’s myths are transferred ceremoniously to the next generation.
Tan is one of the prime storytellers writing fiction today, and Winnie’s recitation is laced with fables and vignettes that make vivid her harrowing past. Born in Shanghai to a wealthy old man and one of his four wives around 1917, Winnie is only 6 when her mother mysteriously disappears. For years Winnie tries to piece together whatever bits of information she can gather, but she never fully understands what happened to her mother, and neither do we. This emotional dismemberment occurs right at the outset, and with it we know we are deep into Tan country. More pain follows: Winnie has a lonely childhood, is married to a brute, has a string of children who die young, suffers humiliation, abuse and rape at the hands of her husband, watches him and his wicked family move into her family home and ransack it, and on and on until her story topples over the brink into melodrama. By the time she is jailed because of her husband’s perfidy, we are almost too dazed to care. A journey of the imagination has become an exercise in sheer embellishment. According to Tan, much of the tale is based on the sufferings of her own mother in China, before she managed to remarry and emigrate. But facts alone don’t make fiction credible; only art does that.
Tan has said that returning to the world of her first novel was not a decision she made easily; she knew she could be accused of simply repeating herself. Yet that world, with its brilliant tapestry of characters and conflicts among the Chinese here and overseas, is worth many novels; it’s worth all the exploration she can give it. Exploration, however, requires more than simply a change of focus. “The Kitchen God’s Wife” abounds in incident, but the excitement is all on the surface. In the end, Winnie’s story reveals little about herself beyond her incredible stoicism. It’s a testament to Tan’s skill that she keeps us turning pages; but when she burrows more deeply into this material, we’ll do more than admire her writing. We’ll be part of that world with her, and we’ll care as much as she does.
