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The Love Wife
From the massively talented, award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon comes “a big story ... about families and identity and race and the American Dream.... Jen’s most ambitious and emotionally ample work yet” ( The New York Times).
The Wongs describe themselves as a “half half” family, but the actual fractions are more complicated, given Carnegie’s Chinese heritage, his wife Blondie’s WASP background, and the various ethnic permutations of their adopted and biological children. Into this new American family comes a volatile new member.
Her name is Lanlan. She is Carnegie’s Mainland Chinese relative, a tough, surprisingly lovely survivor of the Cultural Revolution, who comes courtesy of Carnegie’s mother’s will. Is Lanlan a very good nanny, a heartless climber, or a posthumous gift from a formidable mother who never stopped wanting her son to marry a nice Chinese girl? Rich in insight, buoyed by humor, The Love Wife is a hugely satisfying work.
The Wongs describe themselves as a “half half” family, but the actual fractions are more complicated, given Carnegie’s Chinese heritage, his wife Blondie’s WASP background, and the various ethnic permutations of their adopted and biological children. Into this new American family comes a volatile new member.
Her name is Lanlan. She is Carnegie’s Mainland Chinese relative, a tough, surprisingly lovely survivor of the Cultural Revolution, who comes courtesy of Carnegie’s mother’s will. Is Lanlan a very good nanny, a heartless climber, or a posthumous gift from a formidable mother who never stopped wanting her son to marry a nice Chinese girl? Rich in insight, buoyed by humor, The Love Wife is a hugely satisfying work.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
36 people are currently reading
1106 people want to read
About the author
Gish Jen
40 books430 followersGish Jen grew up in New York, where she spoke more Yiddish than Chinese. She has been featured in a PBS American Masters program on the American novel. Her distinctions also include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute fellowship. She was awarded a Lannan Literary Prize in 1999 and received a Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, she has published in the New Yorker and other magazines.
John Updike selected a story of Jen's for The Best American Short Stories of The Century. Her newest book, Tiger Writing, is based on the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, which she delivered at Harvard University in 2012.
John Updike selected a story of Jen's for The Best American Short Stories of The Century. Her newest book, Tiger Writing, is based on the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, which she delivered at Harvard University in 2012.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 168 reviews
January 24, 2009
What is good about this book is that it undercuts the cliche of the always wise Chinese eespecially elders. The old mother is a nightmare, controlling her son from beyond the grave. The immigrant relative, Lanlan, plays a game of seducing the daughters of the family with 'Chinese wisdom' while seducing the husband in another way. The multiple narrators work well in the audio version, maybe not so well in print. The narration is heavy with the preteen, 11 year old Wendy, and the reader must suspend disbelief at the narrator's maturity and powers of observation, but it works ok. All in all, a kind of rollicking, free wheeling narrative of contemporary family life with detail that incorporates the immigrant experience.
November 12, 2009
Gish Jen: another HOW HAVE I NEVER READ HER BEFORE NOW? author. And where, please, can I find other excellently-written poignant, painful, funny, and incredibly readable novels that address immigration, transracial marriage, transracial/transnational adoption issues, and first/second generation American dynamics? The constantly shifting points of view can be occasionally tricky to wrap your head around, especially when the narrators change 5 times on a single page, but ultimately the conversational flow of the narration is really skillfully done, and allows the reader to really jump inside everyone's head and get to know all the characters intimately.
May 5, 2009
Carnegie Wong is a first generation Chinese-American, with Blondie (his white wife, so nicknamed by his mother); two adopted daughters, one Chinese, one of unknown Asian descent; and baby Bailey, his biological child, who defies genetics and looks not at all Asian. His mother, Mama Wong, is the Asian fiction cliche (So common, in fact, that there has to be some truth in it. At any rate, I love the cliche, so so be it.) of the pidgin English speaking, passive-aggressive, iron-willed manipulator. After her death from Alzheimer's, Carnegie, through a distant relative in China, discovers her will, which requests he bring over Lanlan, a middle-aged Chinese woman who has had a terrible life. Lanlan is to serve as nanny to the children. Will Carnegie fall in love with Lanlan? What do you think?
If you judge this book from the blurbs on the cover and inside, it is the greatest thing since War and Peace. It's not that amazing. It does have an unusual writing style: the characters alternate in telling the reader the story, almost as if they are being interviewed. However, the plot takes some rapid and crazy turns at about chapter 14, and the book never recovers. Whole characters (Gabriela, Blondie's New Age, midlife crisis friend; the Bailey family) are left with no resolution. I feel like Gish Jen was going for something too big here, a swing and a miss.
If you judge this book from the blurbs on the cover and inside, it is the greatest thing since War and Peace. It's not that amazing. It does have an unusual writing style: the characters alternate in telling the reader the story, almost as if they are being interviewed. However, the plot takes some rapid and crazy turns at about chapter 14, and the book never recovers. Whole characters (Gabriela, Blondie's New Age, midlife crisis friend; the Bailey family) are left with no resolution. I feel like Gish Jen was going for something too big here, a swing and a miss.
July 11, 2014
Except for some clunky plotting involving Lan's story near the end, this is overall Jen's best novel (and her others are very good!). Ignore lots of the reviews--the main characters are superbly developed and realistically conflicted, not types, and the book's formal experimentation with the narrative mode--it's a collage of internal monologues that do and do not respond to each other, with all of the major characters have a distinctive voice and p o v --succeeds brilliantly. And even more than Jen's first 2 novels and _Who's Irish?_, her collection of stories, this one is full of Buddhist paradoxes (both funny and tragic) involving identity and consciousness. Identity, that is, conceived of as both individual and family--or independent and interdependent, to use Jen's useful terms from her book _Tiger Writing.
February 19, 2017
I adored this funny, insightful and very forthright novel about a Chinese-American man married to a white woman; their adopted and biological children; the shadow of the man's ambitious, no-nonsense and hypercritical mother; and what happens when a native Chinese woman comes to live with them. It has an unusual structure of alternating viewpoints which I initially found annoying but grew to appreciate.
April 14, 2021
This book is unique in its story and unique in its telling. The narrative flits between the perspectives of the blonde German-Scotch-Irish-American wife Jane "Blondie" Bailey, her Chinese-American husband Carnegie Wong, their two adopted Chinese children Lizzy and Wendy, and their newly arrived Chinese live-in relative Lan.
There are so many layers to this novel that it is difficult to peel them back in one little review. There are typical familial dramas mashed with the complexities that being a biracial family can involve; cross-cultural struggles, including questions on what the American "immigrant story" is, what it really means; a myriad of adoption and adoptee debates; the bonds and difficulties of marriage - the nature of love relationships versus relationships of companionship and necessity; etc, etc, etc. It's a lot to process and would make for a great book club read.
Creatively written, hard to put down, but the ending felt a bit wonky and out of place. But still...the first 3/4 makes it worth it.
There are so many layers to this novel that it is difficult to peel them back in one little review. There are typical familial dramas mashed with the complexities that being a biracial family can involve; cross-cultural struggles, including questions on what the American "immigrant story" is, what it really means; a myriad of adoption and adoptee debates; the bonds and difficulties of marriage - the nature of love relationships versus relationships of companionship and necessity; etc, etc, etc. It's a lot to process and would make for a great book club read.
Creatively written, hard to put down, but the ending felt a bit wonky and out of place. But still...the first 3/4 makes it worth it.
June 11, 2023
i'm so glad I picked this book up. did not expect to be as absorbed as I was. covers the complexities of mixed race marriages, the trauma of adoption, being asian american in the early 2000s, white guilt.... such an interesting glimpse into the evolution of race relations in American even in the past 20 yrs. loved the writing style as well and dependence on dialogue, which I was initially suspicious about. I will definitely come back to this one
April 8, 2016
“The Love Wife,” by Gish Jen (Knopf, 2004; audiobook, read by various narrators). A wonderful book, complex, multi-layered, funny, melancholy, acute. Chinese-American Carnegie Wong is married to WASP Jane Bailey (called Blondie by his demanding, commanding Chinese mother). They have two adopted Asian daughters, teenage Lilly (from China) and 8-year-old Wendy (ancestry not clear), and one natural-born son, Bailey. Mama Wong hates Blondie, and arranges for the family to bring a Chinese woman named Lan to serve as a sort of nanny for the family. Out of this comes an amazing stew: about what it means to be an American, about prejudice, about Chinese responses to the United States, about family, with lengthy descriptions of life during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the history of the Bailey family and their beloved summer retreat deep in the Maine woods, and more. Carnegie resents his mother and works earnestly to keep his marriage and family together. Blondie is not really a caricature of the suburban American woman, trying to keep up with trends, hard-working and successful, trying hard to ignore the seduction of this alien woman into their household. The girls are watching this all, trying to make sense of what is happening while going through adolescence. The Love Wife, in Chinese thinking, is a woman whom a husband turns to for true love beyond his wife. The whole story is told through the voices of the main characters—there is no narration. We see what is happening through each of their eyes: how Lan gradually wins the affection of the girls and weans them away from Blondie; Carnegie’s slow, inevitable love (or something) for Lan; Wendy’s desperate attempts to make sense of what is going on around her; Lan’s gradual adaptation to America. The denouement is bloody and surprising; the marriage finally, unhappily breaks; the stress is ultimately almost too much for Carnegie to bear. Whew.
http://www.gishjen.com/
August 1, 2008
The Love Wife follows the trials and tribulations of a racially mixed family--a white wife (Blondie) from an artsy, waspy family; a Chinese husband (Carnegie); two adopted daughters, one Chinese and one of Asian (possibly Chinese or Japanese) descent; and finally, a late-in-life biological child who takes after Blondie in appearance. A complicated, but loving family until Lan, a distant Chinese relative of Carnegie's, arrives--ostensibly to act as a nanny/caretaker for the family. Instead, she shifts the family's racial dynamics and slowly replaces Blondie as mother and wife figure.
Gish Jen does a nice job of developing the three main characters--Blondie, Carnegie, and Lan (as well as Carnegie's imperious mother), and it's easy to see how conflicted they are. The reader may feel conflicted as well. Who do we root for? Hardworking Lan, who has overcome so much hardship, or well-meaning Blondie? And what of Carnegie, who is only too willing to be led astray? As for the daughters, little Wendy is a sympathetic character, but Lizzy, the stereotypically rebellious teenager is exceptionally cruel and callous.
The book's true climax comes at the very end, and some may feel as I did that the truly interesting part happens after the book's last page. How does Carnegie resolve his conflicted heart? And how does he get his love wife, now that he knows who she is?
As a side note, the book is written in a technically interesting way, with each character "speaking" as if he or she is being interviewed for a documentary. In this way, we sometimes see the same events from multiple points of view, which is particularly enlightening when it comes to understanding the misgivings between Blondie and Lan.
Gish Jen does a nice job of developing the three main characters--Blondie, Carnegie, and Lan (as well as Carnegie's imperious mother), and it's easy to see how conflicted they are. The reader may feel conflicted as well. Who do we root for? Hardworking Lan, who has overcome so much hardship, or well-meaning Blondie? And what of Carnegie, who is only too willing to be led astray? As for the daughters, little Wendy is a sympathetic character, but Lizzy, the stereotypically rebellious teenager is exceptionally cruel and callous.
The book's true climax comes at the very end, and some may feel as I did that the truly interesting part happens after the book's last page. How does Carnegie resolve his conflicted heart? And how does he get his love wife, now that he knows who she is?
As a side note, the book is written in a technically interesting way, with each character "speaking" as if he or she is being interviewed for a documentary. In this way, we sometimes see the same events from multiple points of view, which is particularly enlightening when it comes to understanding the misgivings between Blondie and Lan.
February 28, 2017
Man...families are screwy in a humorous way. People try and try as they might to not mess up their families, but sometimes the mess is part of he master plan. I never saw the end coming!
Extremely enjoyable read! I really like how the story is narrated by all 5 main characters. It gives you a glimpse into each person's perspective on the overall storyline in a pretty quick paced manner.
Extremely enjoyable read! I really like how the story is narrated by all 5 main characters. It gives you a glimpse into each person's perspective on the overall storyline in a pretty quick paced manner.
December 6, 2017
Onvan : The Love Wife - Nevisande : Gish Jen - ISBN : 140007651X - ISBN13 : 9781400076512 - Dar 400 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2004
July 28, 2021
A complicated book about a complicated family. The Father,Carnegie, is Chinese, the wife is a blonde WASP with three unrelated children. And then there is another woman who Carnegie is required by his mother's will, to sponsor and bring into their family. And to complicate more the story is told by each of the characters in a random order. It didn't really work for me.
From the massively talented Gish Jen comes a barbed, moving, and stylistically dazzling new novel about the elusive nature of kinship. The Wongs describe themselves as a “half half” family, but the actual fractions are more complicated, given Carnegie’s Chinese heritage, his wife Blondie’s WASP background, and the various ethnic permutations of their adopted and biological children. Into this new American family comes a volatile new member.Her name is Lanlan. She is Carnegie’s Mainland Chinese relative, a tough, surprisingly lovely survivor of the Cultural Revolution, who comes courtesy of Carnegie’s mother’s will. Is Lanlan a very good nanny, a heartless climber, or a posthumous gift from a formidable mother who never stopped wanting her son to marry a nice Chinese girl? Rich in insight, buoyed by humor, The Love Wife is a hugely satisfying work
From the massively talented Gish Jen comes a barbed, moving, and stylistically dazzling new novel about the elusive nature of kinship. The Wongs describe themselves as a “half half” family, but the actual fractions are more complicated, given Carnegie’s Chinese heritage, his wife Blondie’s WASP background, and the various ethnic permutations of their adopted and biological children. Into this new American family comes a volatile new member.Her name is Lanlan. She is Carnegie’s Mainland Chinese relative, a tough, surprisingly lovely survivor of the Cultural Revolution, who comes courtesy of Carnegie’s mother’s will. Is Lanlan a very good nanny, a heartless climber, or a posthumous gift from a formidable mother who never stopped wanting her son to marry a nice Chinese girl? Rich in insight, buoyed by humor, The Love Wife is a hugely satisfying work
July 4, 2022
I finished The Love Wife and I was entertained, engaged. My feelings for the characters changed often. This is a story of mixed up family and kinship. Carnegie is Chinese but he is American and doesn’t know much of his history. His wife, labeled derogatorily by Carnegie’s mom as “Blondie” is sometimes more Chinese than he is but she is the outsider because she is not Chinese. Her daughter’s are rude to her, her husband doesn’t come to her aide, and Lan the Chinese woman brought over to be a nanny is out right an enemy to Blondie. I found it very interesting story. It was told in multiple voices of the family members in first person and the end parts of Lan did not help to improve my feelings toward her.
September 14, 2022
“The Love Wife”, by Gish Jen, is an interesting novel because the points of view change frequently, so it feels as though you are reading a conversation between the characters as they adjust to the arrival in their inter-racial family of a distant relative from China. It’s an artful book; sometimes the cleverness gets in the way. Surprising plot twist at the end.
I would have rated this higher if I had not discovered that I had actually read it four years ago and reviewed it for Amazon then - It was completely forgotten in my mind, so it's down-rated for forgettability.
I would have rated this higher if I had not discovered that I had actually read it four years ago and reviewed it for Amazon then - It was completely forgotten in my mind, so it's down-rated for forgettability.
May 21, 2019
Gish Jen is insightful about the thought process of her characters who are portrayed in a playful manner and yet they come across quite real and relatable.
The story unfolds from a mélange of viewpoints and juxtaposition of tones as it is told by Mama Wong, Carnegie, Blondie, Lizzy, Wendy and Lanlan. It touches on identity and cross cultural issues as the characters muse through their wisecracks what it means to be Chinese American.
A satisfying read indeed.
https://lifang-leehong.blogspot.com/2...
The story unfolds from a mélange of viewpoints and juxtaposition of tones as it is told by Mama Wong, Carnegie, Blondie, Lizzy, Wendy and Lanlan. It touches on identity and cross cultural issues as the characters muse through their wisecracks what it means to be Chinese American.
A satisfying read indeed.
https://lifang-leehong.blogspot.com/2...
March 28, 2021
This is a thoughtful, hard-hitting domestic novel about family, belonging, and the immigrant experience as told through distinctive and difficult characters. It has a lot to say about relationships, stereotypes, and perceptions. However, the unusual narrative structure was a little hard to get used to, and as a result, none of the characters were really very sympathetic. The ending, unfortunately, also seemed sort of rushed and less well thought out. Nevertheless, a pretty good read.
August 6, 2019
I had a hard time getting through this book due to the way it was written. I enjoyed the characters, loved the way the family was set up between adopted and biological siblings and appreciated that the love of the parents was obvious. I had a hard time with the narration, though. I think it would have been easier to get through as an audiobook to make the switching between characters more obvious.
October 5, 2019
I have never read a book, or started to read a book, with a more irritating flow. The characters make statements that begin with “-“ to differentiate each speaker. It’s very disconcerting and makes it difficult to read. I had to give up. Maybe the story is interesting but I can’t waste my time struggling through a book.
August 29, 2021
I normally love books told from the perspective of multiple characters but this was too much. Switching character to character every sentence at times. I don’t feel it allowed for really good character development. I don’t feel I really got to know who the characters were, what they were thinking and feeling and even what was going on in the story.
May 1, 2023
wanted to enjoy this book of family and culture but I could not. I found the style of the writing disjointed and hard to follow and I could not find a flow. I found myself pushing myself to finish this book. I felt that was a lot I could have enjoyed in this book but I just couldn't get past the slog of reading it.
August 23, 2018
I wasn't so sure about this book at the beginning, as I didn't quite know where it was all heading. By the end, I really liked the narrative changes and the focus on family structures, middle age, adoption, and immigration.
August 17, 2019
Interesting look at Chinese-American culture but characters don’t fully come to life. Husband is Chinese-American, wife midwestern former farm girl, 2 adopted Asian daughters and biological son. Then a nanny comes from mainland to stay with them as nanny and disaster ensues.
April 22, 2020
A good read, although what was happening at the end got confusingly lost. I wasn't enamored of the narrative style of switching narrators willy-nilly; I don't think it added much. But still, Jen is a good story-teller.
August 3, 2021
Really enjoy this beyond my expectations! Extremely vivid characters. Complicated plot. Fascinating cultural clash/match/variety details. Agree with one reviewer on the back who said “a wondrous swoosh of a story”
October 2, 2022
I bought this book about 20 years ago after a presentation by the author. I had a signed copy but never got around to reading it. Finally picked it up. The writing style is interesting with exchanges among characters. A surprising ending that left open many questions.
December 12, 2022
I did not like how the author did the point of view of the characters. It was very choppy during first 2/3 of book. I did get into the book about 1/2 way through. But it wasn’t enough for me to like the book. The ending was bizarre.
December 7, 2023
Omg this story was crazy!!! I’ve never read a novel that reads like this in terms of rotating narrators within chapters. It was beautiful and wild like an ornate heirloom trash fire. Couldn’t put it down.
June 27, 2024
I really like Gish Jen. Her sense of humor appeals to me, and her characters are complicated and not easily categorized. This novel is full of surprises -- just when you think you know where it's headed, it veers in a different direction.
January 6, 2018
I did not enjoy the writing style, so I just let it go. Maybe it was just me or my mood at the time.
October 10, 2018
A novel about families and kinship and American dreams. First half very enjoyable. Dragged a bit in second half.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 168 reviews