"World and Town"

Gish Jen’s fiction is a perfect example of the increasing multiculturalization of American literature; her novels and short stories are (mostly) about immigrant families, and families of mixed ethnic and religious backgrounds. Her fiction closely observes the everyday lives, issues, problems, and tensions of such families and their members. It also explores the benefits and pleasures of discovering the differences and the similarities in those of other cultures than one’s own. Jen writes seriously about serious situations, but there is always a wryness, a sense of humor underlying and informing her fiction. In her latest novel, “World and Town” (Knopf, 2010), her wonderful and completely nonstereotyped, unpredictable main character is a sixtyish woman named Hattie, whose parents were a white missionary mother and a Chinese father; Hattie grew up both in China and in the U.S., and lived her adult life in the U.S. Both her husband and her best friend have recently died, and she has moved to the outskirts of a small town, where her neighbors are a Cambodian family of recent refugees. She becomes involved with their family problems as well as their successes. She also tries to figure out how she feels about the reappearance in her life of a lover from her youth. Jen’s multiple and various characters are entirely original, unlike those in any other novel I have read recently, yet very understandable and (mostly!) sympathetic. The issues explored in the novel are current, yet the novel never feels like an “issue” novel. The book also has much to show us about small towns and about community. “World and Town” manages to be heartwarming without at all veering into sentimentality. Highly recommended.