The Love Wife, by Gish Jen, is a novel of frustrations; no one in the story is pleased with his or her life, always looking for the proverbial grass that they assume is greener on the other side of the fence.
Carnegie Wong is a second-generation Chinese-American, married to Janie, a stereotypical Midwestern woman who everyone calls Blondie. Carnegie is a mama's boy, constantly apologizing to his mother, Mama Wong, for not being a good enough son, not being ambitious enough and, most of all, for not being Chinese enough. She shuns Blondie, who also seems to always be apologizing for not being Chinese even though she is probably more aware of Chinese culture than the couple's two adopted Asian daughters.
When Mama Wong dies, she discharges into her son's care a female relative, a mysterious and single woman who is to become both housekeeper and nanny for Carnegie and Blondie. The arrival of this woman, Lan, throws the family into turmoil as they attempt to integrate her into the household.
Lan proves to be very passive-aggressive and cunning in her attempts to ingratiate herself to Carnegie and his daughters, while Blondie is excessively naïve in her initial belief that if she just "tries harder" she can please everyone, not lose her daughters to the newcomer and, most importantly, not lose her husband to this "love wife" willed to him by his mother. Blondie eventually clings to 15-month-old Bailey, her and Carnegie's biological son, who takes after her physically and so she considers him her only ally as the family is torn apart.
This novel may have been more appealing to me if it weren't for the way it is presented. Jen writes her story as if all the characters are standing around you telling it from their perspective. This, in itself, is not what is bothersome to me. After all, Margaret Atwood does a very good job of varying perspective in her novels, presenting each chapter from a different character's perspective. What is problematic about The Love Wife is that the story's perspective changes from paragraph to paragraph: like when your excitable cousins are trying to tell you an anecdote, but they keep interrupting each other and finishing each other's sentences.
This style of writing jerks the reader around from character to character, perspective to perspective, so that even the very Midwestern American Blondie seems to be speaking in the same broken-English dialect as her husband, Carnegie. And perhaps this is Jen's greatest failing in this novel a real lack of distinction between her character's voices. Even the teenage daughters are indistinguishable in voice from their parents, except when Jen remembers to throw a few "like" and "you know" verbalized pauses into the daughters' quotes.
I really wanted to like this novel but, sadly, I have to say that there are probably better novels showing the culture clash of mixed ethnicity marriages.
