Allegra Goodman Reviews World and TownAllegra Goodman’s novels include The Cookbook Collector, Intuition and Kaaterskill Falls. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories. She is a winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read her review of World and Town:
Gish Jen sets her novel in a small Vermont town, but extends her reach to the larger world when she writes about Hattie Kong and her new neighbors, a Cambodian family trying to start over after suffering from the traumas of war and the temptations of American city life.
Hattie has retreated to Riverlake in part for solitude, but she finds herself caught up in her neighbors’ struggles. Teenagers Sarun and Sophy try to forge American identities, even as their parents fear for their lives and souls. Slowly, Hattie begins to understand her neighbors’ history, and she sees that they are living with ghosts from their terrible past. At the same time, Hattie’s first love, Carter, appears on the scene, and she must come to terms with ghosts of her own.
I love the voices in this book--each compelling, each contributing to the layered story. I love Gish Jen’s sense of history as both personal and political, intimate and communal. The novel is powerful but also subtle and wise in its use of multiple points of view. It’s a book that begins with grief: Hattie is mourning her husband and her best friend, her neighbors grieve for what they lost in Cambodia. But grief is only a beginning. This is really a novel about survival and reconciliation.
Another writer might fall into sentimentality, bathos, or wish-fulfilling fantasy, but Gish never condescends to her characters. Their traumas and their mistakes, their self-deceptions, and their hard-earned victories read as utterly real. You will find yourself swept up and completely absorbed by this polyphonic and immensely moving novel. The world is Gish Jen’s stage. Her town becomes a theater in the round.
Review
“Gish Jen’s triumph of a novel World and Town starts with all the energy of a runaway train—or actually, a runaway trailer. Jump on. You’ll enjoy the ride. . . . What interests the author is how we interpret family, culture and home. . . . From family plots to subplots, Jen orchestrates everything. In fact, there's something symphonic about the novel itself . . . her richest, warmest work yet.” –Ellen Kanner, The Miami Herald
“What a pleasure to read this smart, warm novel from Gish Jen [which] manages in its amiable, unhurried way, to consider the challenges of immigration, the limits of scientific rationalism, and the sins of fundamentalism. Yes, it’s a heavy load for such a buoyant story to carry, but Jen knows how to create thoughtful characters who can talk and think about complex issues without making us take notes.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“One of Jen’s greatest strengths is her fluid point of view, which she employs beautifully here, alternating perspectives . . . 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, The New York Times Book Review
“A powerful message . . . A novel not about being, but becoming, American, which to some extent means the same thing. . . Jen’s prose is dense, minutely descriptive and often arresting .” —Malena Watrous, The San Francisco Chronicle
“A beautifully written novel of wit and insight and great generosity. Jen’s novels do not come along often, so this is not one to miss.” —Claire Hopley, The Washington Times
“Jen knows the rhythm of life in a small town, where swirls of gossip can set events in motion, and personal history exerts a stronger force than anything that happens in the wider world . . . She’s generous to her characters, even the violent or larcenous ones. Her bighearted, rumpled novel gives them room to change directions and find new ways to live together.” –Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch
“In this thick, satisfactory sprawl of a read . . . Jen gracefully introduces some of the great issues of or 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 . . . When she slides into the voice of a 15-year-old Cambodian girl or the bitter old-timer angry over the loss of his farm and wife, World and Town practically sings.” —Karen Valby, Entertainment Weekly
“World and Town is lavish with acutely drawn incidents and characters . . . An imaginatively questioning and shrewdly written novel of our times.” —Richard Eder, The Boston Globe
“Jen is masterful at mixing keen observation with wit and wisdom . . . In her latest, she is at her best, diving into the pain and promise of coming to America.” —Amy Scribner, Bookpage
“[Jen’s] ability to inhabit varied minds and hearts without drawing attention to her efforts evokes the compassionate omniscience of George Eliot.” —Carlene Bauer, Whole Living
“Jen’s sensitivity and charming humor should vault this to the top of book groups’ must reads.” —Beth E. Anderson, Library Journal
“Unique, dense, enthralling . . . Jen unwinds another expansive story of identity and acceptance, deploying voices that are as haunting and revealing as they are original.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review and Pick of the Week
“Sharply funny and wisely compassionate, Jen’s richly stippled novel slyly questions every assumption about existence and meaning even as it celebrates generosity, friendship, and love.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review
About the Author
Gish Jen is the author of three previous novels and a book of stories. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
