In the long run, she succeeds in this remarkable book, even though her method is initially awkward and sometimes downright unbelievable. I think she faced the problem of how to tell the amazing tale she needed to tell and persuade us to ponder it apart from being merely entertained by it. But I believe she was searching for a subtle way to pose a philosophical question. Tan's intention to present us with a formulaic character and then slowly reveal to us our own misconceptions. She is full of dour aphorisms, is preternaturally cranky and so intrusive that Pearl has kept secret for seven years the fact that she is afflicted with multiple sclerosis. It is unfortunate that we first encounter her through the eyes of her 40-year-old daughter, Pearl, because Winnie seems disappointingly stereotypical. Tan eventually relates the story of Jiang Weili (Weiwei) from the time she was 6 years old in the China of 1925 through the present, in which she is Winnie Louie, the widowed matriarch of an extended Chinese family living in San Francisco. The novel gets off to a slow start, but Ms. 'The Kitchen God's Wife' is a more ambitious effort and, in the end, greatly satisfying.

No doubt it was daunting to attempt a second book in the wake of the enormous success of 'The Joy Luck Club,' but none of Ms.

Within the peculiar construction of Amy Tan's second novel is a harrowing, compelling and at times bitterly humorous tale in which an entire world unfolds in a Tolstoyan tide of event and detail.

The kitchen god's wife novelist 1991