World and Town (Jen) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
One of Jen's greatest strengths is her fluid point of view, which she employs beautifully here, alternating perspectives among Hattie, Sophy and a local man named Everett, whose wife is Sophy's sponsor at the Heritage Bible Church. 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 - New York Times


What a pleasure to read this smart, warm novel from Gish Jen…If you've already enjoyed Anne Tyler's Digging to America and Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, you have some idea of the tenor of World and Town. Jen's fourth novel 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, like Allegra Goodman, Jen knows how to create thoughtful characters who can talk and think about complex issues without making us take notes.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


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 - Miami Herald


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 - 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


Jen (The Love Wife) unwinds another expansive story of identity and acceptance, deploying voices that are as haunting and revealing as they are original. Hattie Kong, 68 and full of unresolved longing for her dead husband, her best friend, and an old lover, finds a sort of purpose in the new neighbors, an immigrant Cambodian family. As she nurtures a friendship with the family’s teenage daughter, Sophy, Hattie learns the family’s secrets. Sophy’s father, Chhung, has survived the horrors of Pol Pot, marrying Sophy’s mother in a refugee camp and adopting her brother, Sarun. Sarun and Sophy founder in America; Sarun has gang ties, and Sophy becomes involved with manipulative evangelicals. Chhung, isolated and unable to cope with his children, spends his days digging a pit behind their cramped trailer until one day he implodes in an act of horrifying violence. While pondering how to help the family, Hattie discovers much about her own motivations and her place in the world as the daughter of an American missionary and a descendant of Confucius. Jen’s prose is unique, dense, and enthralling, and her characters are marvels of authenticity.
Publishers Weekly


Hattie Kong, a 68-year-old high school teacher, seeks solace both from 9/11 and her own personal tragedies in Riverlake, a small New England town. It's been two years since she buried her husband and best friend within a wrenchingly short time, leaving Hattie with her dogs and a crushing loneliness. The daughter of an American missionary and a Chinese father, Hattie befriends the Chhungs, her Cambodian-refugee neighbors, offering tutoring and advice as they struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, teens in trouble (one is in a gang, two are in foster care, and 15-year-old Sophy is drawn into a Christian fundamentalist church with cascading devastating consequences). Carter, Hattie's long-ago lover, has also settled in Riverlake. A former neuroscientist, he is now teaching yoga and trying to resolve old business with Hattie. The ripple effects of 9/11 on Hattie and company are compounded by the insularity of their community. Verdict: Riverlake serves as a road map through the minefields of prejudice and fear planted in post-9/11 America. Jen's (The Love Wife) sensitivity and charming humor should vault this to the top of book groups' must-reads. —Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal


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. A new novel by exuberant and insightful, much-loved and much-talked-about Gish Jen is big book news. —Donna Seaman
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