Book Talk :: The Kitchen God's Wife

The Kitchen God's Wife

by Amy Tan

I finished reading, "The Kitchen God's Wife" for book club. It was ... all right. It seems like exactly the kind of book I'd love, but it wasn't. I still can't figure out why I found it so dull and anti-climactic. My favorite author is E.M. Forster, for pete's sake, so I know I can tolerate a bit of slow-moving plot. If you've only read "A Room with a View" then you don't know how long-winded and rambling Forster can be. But he's brilliant, insightful and a fabulous story crafter. Amy Tan's novel just left me vaguely disinterested. I should have really wept in parts where I could only muster a tear or two.

Was it because of the main character who is first introduced by her daughter in a very unflattering light? Did that cause me to just have a hard time sympathizing with her? Was it because we were constantly led on by the promises of the main character's "deep, dark history" that she hasn't shared with her daughter... only to realize, in the end, that the secrets being kept were really not that earth-shattering?

I tend to think that it failed to do what my favorite book, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, did brilliantly. In both books, we are given vast amounts of foreshadowing and then taken back in time to tell the story. In Zusak's "The Book Thief," the events that unfold are still heart-rendingly beautiful. The characters are built up so beautifully--the children's innocence, the foster parents' complexity and unlikely likability--that we really care more about them as the book goes on.

However, in "The Kitchen God's Wife," we know that whoever the main character once was, she will eventually turn into a nagging, controlling tightwad. It's hard to care how difficult her youth was when she apparently turned all that life experience into "cranky old lady" fodder. I'm sure others found the character far more sympathetic than I did, since it was a New York Times bestseller. It just fell flat for me.

As the characters develop in each novel, the plots jump back and forth in time. In Zusak's novel, although we know the ending will not be a happy one, there are just enough loose ends to wonder, "Who escapes the tragedy that we know must be coming?" and when Zusak suddenly starts a chapter with the observation that Rudy Steiner didn't deserve to die the way he did, it's hard not to break into tears and sob with the knowledge that Rudy will not be one to escape.

In Tan's novel, the shifts in time wanted me to shout to, "Get on with it! We know she ends up getting away from the abusive husband and moving to America! What else you got??" The single most "shocking" reason why the main character has not told this history to her daughter is revealed in the first half of the book, leaving very little climax for the last part of the story.

In the end, it was a sweet story about mother and daughter learning to trust each other, but it fell flat for me. It just seems that a few plot changes would have given the book a much more climactic feel to it and given the reader a chance to become engaged in wondering how the story would end. Since we were given that all in the beginning, the route to get there was far less compelling than I expected it would be.