World and Town by Gish Jen

World and Town Reviews

• 
  Alex Templeton

  Now why don’t books like this get attention as a Great, Sweeping American Novel of Our Time, a la Mr. Franzen’s “Freedom”? (I know, I know, it’s a whole new literary year, get over it. But, in my defense, this book was published in the same year, so I think it’s a fair question!) This novel is about the small-town community of Riverlake in the year of 2001. I don’t believe Riverdale is given a location in a particular state (I would imagine this is intentional?). Its main character is Hattie Kong, a late-sixties Chinese immigrant who has been in America most of her life. A Cambodian immigrant family, the Chhungs, feature prominently in the story, as do a couple in which the newly Christian evangelist wife leaves her husband of thirty-seven years. The novel is, essentially, about their intersecting lives, and asks questions about community (who is your community? Your family? Your town? The world?) and perception (a neat theme is the idea of what we can and can’t perceive, both physically and mentally). I’ve read Gish Jen’s last two novels, and this is by far my favorite. Its scope is large (this makes its plot kind of hard to describe), but it is always rooted in her wonderful, fresh descriptions and character moments. I would recommend this for lovers of good literary fiction and, yes, Great, Sweeping American Novels of Our Time.
• 
  Ron Charles

  What a pleasure to read this smart, warm novel from Gish Jen. It's another in a small but growing collection of books about getting older -- not getting decrepit or sick or depressed, but just getting older, with all the perspective such maturity can endow. 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.
  
  Her heroine is 68-year-old Hattie Kong, a curious, compassionate woman looking somewhat nervously at the next stage of her life. A good liberal, she fought all the right fights -- "Vietnam! Staff firings! Library closings!" -- but "her chief job these days is to reconstitute herself." She recently endured the deaths of her husband and her best friend and then retired from teaching, so she's emerging from the jolting loss of occupation and companionship. "This is an age of flux," Hattie reminds herself, hopefully. "One thing will become another." She loves the peaceful setting of her new home in little Riverlake -- "a town that would have pink cheeks, if a town had cheeks" -- but she clearly has a lot of extra time and energy. Her late husband referred to her as "Miss Combustible."
  
  One of the great charms of "World and Town" is how fluidly Jen mingles the tone and content of Hattie's scattered thoughts with her own third-person narration. As the daughter of a Chinese father and an American missionary mother, Hattie has spent her whole life feeling foreign. The scientist she became has no use for the theology of her American grandparents or the superstitions of her Chinese relatives, who pester her by e-mail with special requests to satisfy the dead. But more recently, the dogmatic tendencies of science have begun to irritate her as well.
  
  These concerns are all brought to life in the novel by the arrival of several new residents. Like Hattie, Carter Hatch has recently retired, lost his spouse (to divorce) and moved to Riverlake, he says, "to force myself off task." Thirty-five years ago, he and Hattie worked in the same laboratory, and seeing him again now for the first time scrapes the hurt (and romantic) feelings they buried long ago. But if Hattie isn't willing to stoke the old flame, why shouldn't other women in town move in on this distinguished scientist who sails and teaches yoga?
  
  While that retiree version of Emma & Mr. Knightley plays out in a series of sharp, witty arguments, the focus of the novel and of Hattie's life turns to a dysfunctional family of Cambodian immigrants who move into a trailer next to her house. Hattie welcomes them to the neighborhood, spies on them shamelessly through her binoculars and befriends their teenage daughter, Sophie, whose abusive father keeps her from school. He's clearly traumatized by the horrors of Pol Pot and incapable of any kind of productive integration into American society.
  
  This is tough material -- sometimes even violent -- but it doesn't feel tough in Jen's tender retelling, and it's shot through with the author's sympathetic understanding of the cruelty that those who have suffered can end up inflicting upon others. All of us, she suggests, are trapped in our own beliefs, a fact that should humble us as we go about passing judgment. Hattie learned that lesson from personal experience and then from neurobiology, studying the ways vision becomes perception. She's interested in "how differently people see. And what we can't see, because of how we see." As Sophie struggles to negotiate her father's superstitions, her mother's Buddhism and a local church's dogma, Hattie wants to be the voice of enlightenment, advising the young woman to rise above others' limited views, but to what extent is Hattie similarly bound by the dimensions of her own beliefs?
  
  You might expect the novel's philosophical and theological concerns to fit awkwardly with its cozy domestic comedy -- as though Fannie Flagg and Marilynne Robinson were passing the book back and forth. But whether talking about salvation through faith or the biases of science or the vanities of women of a certain age at yoga class, Jen blends these various strains with endearing finesse.
  
  What doesn't work so well, though, is the way the plot turns upon the wickedness of a born-again Christian. Particularly in a novel about tolerating and respecting people's beliefs, it's disappointing to be led down the straight and narrow way toward the holy grail of liberal cliches: the hypocritical Christian, clutching her baby Jesus while spouting a doctrine of hate. Late in the novel Jen inserts a whole chapter -- "What Went Wrong" -- to explain how someone might fall into such bitter religious fervor, but to the extent it demonizes fundamentalists, it's fundamentally condescending.
  
  And yet it's that very temptation of condescension that Hattie overcomes by the novel's end, when she finally finds a way to harmonize her own rationalism with what she considers others' nutty superstitions. We need "vision with a small v," Jen suggests. "Something more Inuit-like -- more oriented toward the living. Something more Confucian." As this humane novel shows, that has nothing to do with giving up one's most cherished beliefs, but it requires acknowledging that others hold their beliefs just as firmly and that only active compassion will build a better world and town.
  
  
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
• 
  Sarah

  This was the September book for my book club. I have to admit that wanted to stop reading early on, but as I was the leader for this book, I trudged on. While working through book, I suspected no one in my book club would finish this book. I was correct. The reason they quit was the reason I wanted to quit - the third person writing made the book had to follow.
  
  We did have a discussion on some of the themes of the book: who/what is America/American; rebirth; what is your community; family, town, and world; and is being alone the same as being lonely.
  
  I appreciate what Gish Jen tried to do with this book, but it didn't engage me or my book club.
  2.5 stars bumped up to 3.
• 
  Janet

  I tried, I really did, but I found myself not paying attention-I kept reading the same sentence four or five times after letting myself get distracted from reading. I prefer books where the writing flows in one direction-this book is like reading a pinball machine, with thoughts, actions, and dialogue going off on tangents. I don't have the concentration needed to appreciate this book.
• 
  Karis

  3.5: a simultaneously nurturing yet cerebral read? i enjoyed cozying up with it in my blankets and being immersed in this lowkey, plaintive, and deeply layered world, yet also there was just...so much that one senses is there but can't figure out how to uncover. will have to come back to it to determine how successfully i think the book dealt with the intricate web of topics gish jen had in mind: missionary and evangelistic culture, asia and the u.s., american small towns, the religions and worlds we make out of everything.
  
  and! the writing is so lovely.
  
  this is also the first book i ever checked out from the new haven free public library so i enjoyed that a lot. :)
• 
  Kate

  There are so many layers to this book and at the end, I almost found myself wishing it weren't a library book so I could highlight some of the dialog. The basic story is of a widowed half American, half Chinese woman living in what may be Vermont or New Hampshire. A family of Cambodian refugees sponsored by a local church moves into a trailer the church installs on some land next to her house. Hattie's involvement with members of the family, as well as with an old love who moves back to town, provides a page-turning story line that inspires deeper questions about who is welcome in our country, religion, and even how we view the meaning in our lives. Pretty heavy stuff - but Gish Jen brings these topics up so deftly and with such an engaging plot and cast of characters, it can simply be an excellent story. The introspection it can prompt is a bonus - if you want it!
• 
  musa b-n

  This was a really amazing book that I super enjoyed reading. I don't remember why I picked it out on the libby app, but I moved through it pretty slowly, which I think the prose encourages. It's kind of meandering, but only in the most pleasant way.
  
  Which is not to say the book is pleasant. I'm not sure that's how I'd describe its general tone or content. But overall? I think somewhat pleasant. At least, I was never viscerally upset while reading it.
  
  I often felt Represented or seen somehow, which is really nice to find in a book. The characters all make their own sort of sense, and, I don't know! Everything feels Real in a satisfying way; like when you're walking outside at the same time as a lot of other people, and you think about how each and every one of them has their own inner life; thoughts, process, decisions, narrative. And instead of getting scared (as you might on occasion), you instead feel full, and maybe connected. That's the feeling that World and Town gave me.
  
  This book definitely requires content warnings; friends, feel free to reach out if you decide to read this.
• 
  Diane

  In World and Town, Gish Jen introduces us to Hattie Kong, a 68 year old retired Biology teacher who was born in China but came to America after the Communist takeover. Her father was a descendent of Confucius. After Hattie loses both her husband, and her best friend to cancer in a period of two years, she moves to the fictional Vermont town of Riverlake, where she lives in the mountains along with her three dogs. She has a small circle of walking friends, she paints, yet her days are still lonely. Her son Josh calls now and then to make sure all is well, but they rarely have very much to say to one another.
  
  Before long an immigrant family from Cambodia, also trying to start a new and more peaceful life, move into town near Hattie. The Chhung family is living in a trailer on church property. The family consists of a mother, father, teenage daughter and son and also an infant son here in Vermont. They also have two additional girls who were placed in foster homes prior to the family moving this area. While other members of the community struggle to sort out what their duty to the newcomers should be, Hattie has both the time and the willingness to assist this family in their transition to life in Vermont. Although the family is reluctant to let an outsider into their circle, Hattie takes to Sophy, the fifteen year old girl, who begins to open up and share with her the Chhung family's painful past. When another neighbor, Ginny introduces Sophy to an extremist church, Sophy becomes obsessed with the its teachings and she begins to cool her relationship with Hattie, who is opposed to their preachings.
  
  Just as the Chhungs arrival to the area had changed Hattie's life, so had the arrival of a former lover from her youth, Carter Hatch. He, like Hattie and the Chhungs moved to the area to start a new life. Carter and Hattie worked together, had a relationship and married other people. Now Carter is retired, a former neuroscientist is back in the picture in an on again, off again sort of way. For me, this was the least satisfying part an otherwise terrific novel.
  
  Gish Jen is a new author for me, but I thought that she did a great job with this novel. The writing had me invested in the story early on, but there is certainly more darkness in this story than I expected. The characters are fully fleshed out, so that I felt like some of the many characters, could be people found in most any town in America these days. This immigrant story paints mostly painful portrait of life, yet I was happy I read the book.
  
  
• 
  Elyse Walters

  Wow! This novel is deeply affecting. Demands some 'thinking'.
  
  Hattie Kong is 68 years old. She's living alone in a New England mountain town with her 3 dogs, having lost her husband and best friend to Cancer.
  She's a retired Biology teacher --and life feels somewhat empty. (yes, she takes walks with other woman in the town -- stays 'busy' with hobbies -- but its clear those inner lonely feelings way heavy).
  And then...
  A Cambodian family, (strange, distressed, & dysfunctional), moves just down the hill from Hattie--- (living in a trailer-park on a Church-owned property).
  
  "Its a World Come to Town" she imagines her dead husband saying".....
  
  That is where this novel takes off.....
  
  Questions I ask myself?
  Do I disempower family & friends by giving advice & getting 'too' involved? Am I projecting 'my' incomplete past onto their future? Where does community begin --and stop?
  
  Back to this novel: Hattie 'does' want to help. (especially the teen daughter). Other folks in the town feel different. ---But the teenager, Sophy, discloses details about their family's situation. (horrible history leaving damaging effects) ---
  The children don't seem to be going to school. The mother is often drunk -- so Sophy begins to fine refuge at a fundamentalist Christian church. She wants to be 're-born'.
  Hattie cautions her (fears the solutions of the hard sell of the church is not the answer to what Sophy needs) .....
  
  The news of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks comes to this town as well -- (alternating perspectives) ....
  "The World Comes to town" is a tender complicated -- devastating and hopeful novel ---graceful beautiful writing.
  
• 
  Lauren

  The main character of World and Town is Hattie - a widow in her 70s who was born in China of a Chinese father and a missionary white mother and sent to the US to be raised by relatives when the communists took over China. Besides her husband, Hattie has lost her best friend to cancer and when a Cambodian family takes up residence in a neighboring trailer, she spends much of her time helping them. In addition, an old colleague (and lover) returns to the small town which further complicates Hattie's life and brings up old memories she'd just as soon forget. Most of the book is from Hattie's perspective but there are two other sections - one told by the teenage Cambodian daughter Sophee and one by Hattie's neighbor Everett who has been kicked out of his house by his born-again wife. Where Hattie's voice rings true, the parts by Sophee and Everett are really self-conscious attempts at capturing a teenage and a rural man's voice and I found them awkward.
  
  So...not great, but good parts and Hattie is a wonderful main character, very complex. I'd have been happy if the whole book had been about her. I get where Jen was going and I admire what she was setting out to do - exploring the loneliness of aging, reason vs superstition, the tensions between old and new, the lure of the evangelical church to the new immigrant - but don't feel like she ultimately got there.
  
  Still, a flawed book by a good writer grappling with contemporary America is preferable to mindlss fluff about nothing.
  
• 
  Elliot Ratzman

  Set in a vaguely New England town around 2001, this novel centers around retired schoolteacher and Confucian descendent Hattie Kong and her attempt to heal the lives of her small-town neighbors. Her new neighbors are Cambodian, suffering from the trauma of genocide, gangs and culture shock. The daughter falls in with an Evangelical Church, the father with ghosts from the past and the son with violence. Clint Eastwood’s “get off my lawn” this is not, but rather a gentle drama of miscommunication and seniors starting over. The author quotes Weber: “'man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”; webs link this small town—via email, tradition and generations—to the larger world. Though a promising premise, the novel could have used an astute editor—there are continuity gaps, annoying repetition, and the improbably dialogue has the main characters speaking in quotations. Not great literature, but a decent read of the secular American version of being ‘born again’.
• 
  Betty

  This rambling story, as the title implies, covers diverse territory. Three religions (Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity), several ethnicities (Cambodian, Chinese, North American), as well as the separate worlds of the dead/living--all set in a remote New England town. The past seems unreconciled for many characters, as dead or absent relatives, spouses, and friends crop up in the thoughts and lives of those living. For all the past and present tragedy here, the novel manages to spiral upward (out of Chhung's pit he and his son have dug) from Hattie Kong's friendship with a troubled family of Cambodian refugees. Even the wind, snow, rain, sun, and nature's fauna, and Hattie's dogs, seem like characters. The words in the mouths of various characters was convincing, portraying their origins and age. Interesting were the social problems of a small community, the general scare after 9/11, and the philosophy of what to strive for in life. (Amazon Vine Uncorrected Proof)
• 
  Britta

  Meh. I enjoyed the cultural aspects of World and Town, but overall, the text was disjointed. There are multiple plot developments, and the novel jumps from one development to the next without the seamlessness I look for in well written fiction. I also struggled with the progression of Jen's storytelling. She frequently introduced plot points with little explanation, making for jumpy prose that often left me confused. Everett's section of the novel seemed so out of the place within the rest of the book; it was like a short story within a novel.
  
  I didn't dislike World and Town, but I certainly didn't love it. The novel isn't well put together, and it also dragged on for way too long. I thought it could have been at least a hundred pages shorter and done the trick.
• 
  Moira

  Gorgeous, sophisticated writing about things that resonate particularly strongly with me. Gish Jen manages to touch on the major themes of our time - immigration, the Church, religious intolerance, addiction, gang violence, the environment, terrorism - in a narrative that never once feels forced or overstuffed. (Great reading, too, for a long vacation in an upstate New York town with a large population of summer residents.)
• 
  Victoria Poon

  The was a slow read. Wordy and must be read slowly to absorb. However, the themes of belonging and the various groups to which we belong to find meaning are interesting. Hattie seems to be displaced from country and culture. In the end it seems her not belonging was a decision in her own mind. When she opens herself to the mysteries of family religion, love and acceptance of the life around her - she finds the peace and belonging she has so long ago given up on.
• 
  West Hartford Public Library

  What a wonderful story of community and what it means to belong. Hattie Kong,a Chinese- American woman, recently retired from teaching and even more recently widowed, finds herself engaged with her new neighbors, immigrants from Cambodia. In helping them adjust to their new home, she comes to terms with her own past, her loves, her losses and her sense of identity.
  
• 
  Josh

  More solemn in tone than Jen's previous novels, but probably her most mature work. It's worth reading World and Town in tandem with the book based on her Massey Lectures at Harvard, "Tiger Writing: Art, Literature, and the Interdependent Self" to see what she's up to here. The novel explores and complicates easy binaries of in- and interdependence, and East and West.
• 
  Alisa

  A quiet, reflective novel. Science, community, globalization, bitterness, pride and hubris. Love and relationships from a wide angle. I enjoyed it. The thing about this book that will stick with me the longest is the idea of one's own body as one's "life's companion."
• 
  Lorri Steinbacher

  Great characters, but I had a hard time getting into the relationship of Carter and Hattie.
• 
  Michael Percy

  This book caught my eye at the bookstore but I bought Ha Jin's
  Waiting instead. Soon after I regretted not buying World and Town and I was compelled to go back to the bookstore and buy it. I am glad I did. I usually find it difficult to give five stars to modern literature because I often find the classics so much better. Will this be a classic? I don't think so, but it might just be one of those long-lost gems in years to come. This novel covers so much ground yet brings it together so well. It is a book of contrasts. Old age, youth. Children, death. Multiculturalism but from so many angles. Chinese history. Cambodian history. Vietnam veterans, the disintegration of the family farm, the end of long-term marriages, foster homes. Religion - Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, burial, suicide, ethnic gangs, multilingualism, academia, science versus religion, religion versus science, pets, old love, new love. Kids who say "like" in the middle of every sentence, small town life, emails from home to the diaspora (like letters that form part of the dialogue in earlier novels), music, farming, hippies. In many ways it presents a version of the United States as it is rather than as it is imagined by some (I can only guess, but it resonates with the realities of Australia's cultural diversity). And it all concentrates on a small town in the north. I wondered if Hattie, the protagonist, would start to bore me. She just seemed so old. I think of Scott Fitzgerald who said nobody wants to read about poor people. But Hattie is so complex, so interesting. She is nosy, an artist, a scientist, a teacher, lonely. Yet she has a drive and a sense of self-discovery that makes you forget she is an old retired Chinese-American widow living in a small town. The connections with the rest of the world, the different ideas of filial responsibility, of God's work versus the manipulation of churches that prey (not pray!) on the vulnerable. The book even mentions the idea of "third culture kids" (something I have only ever read about in academia). It taught me a few things about adaptability and change, too (p. 232):

  Even pigeons try to connect what they do with what happens to them. Really, they have no control. But they're wired to try anyway. They have a connection bias, just like people - a tendency to look for cause and effect, whether it's there or not.

  Did you know that "Houdini had a tool pocket in the lining of his mouth"? I didn't. Now I have to find out if it's true. Do you know (p. 246):

  ...what it meant to have had our structures adapted and readapted, but never fundamentally redesigned[?]

  I didn't. I don't know whether to call this a lovely story or an inspiring yet realistic tale. But I did love the book and I look forward to reading some more of Gish Jen's work. In an era of xenophobic nonsense, this novel sheds some light on what the world is like beneath the veneer of how things used to be.
• 
  Lisa

  This is my first time reading this author, and I like her style!
  
  The protagonist is a fun character. Hattie's a widow who's able to laugh at herself. She's a retired woman by the time this book starts, but that's not a bad thing from her point of view. She's had a fulfilling life, and, even at an older age, she's an independent woman.
  
  Hattie, however, is still feeling out of place in her town of Riverlake. She lacks a sense of identity, something that has plagued her for decades, being half Chinese, half American. And that's how she gets involved with her new Cambodian neighbors, another group of people who are feeling displaced and unsure of where they belong, which gives Hattie that sense of feeling needed.
  
  The theme of this book is definitely about identity and belonging in a community. You follow different characters as they try to find the place/community they can belong to, and watch as they either fail or succeed.
  
  Another major theme also seems to be mourning the past and the people each character lost. The Cambodian family in particular had a really terrible experience in their home country, something that still affects the father, Chhung. I don't know if I really like Chhung, but I definitely feel sorry for him.
  
  What makes this book really good, however, is the writing style. The author tells the story from three points of view: Hattie (our elderly protagonist), Sophy (the teenage Cambodian daughter who feels like she should have never been born), and Everett (a local farmer who finds himself completely displaced by his wife of 37 years). All three characters are completely different from each other, and you can see it in how they narrate their part of the story. Gish Jen did a brilliant job changing the style of narration to fit each character: Hattie's thoughtful pondering, Sophy's fast-paced rambling, and Everett's steady and ordered opinion. This is the first time I've seen an author successfully depict a character's personality in their writing style, with the ability to change the style from one character to the next. Absolutely genius!
  
  All in all, I really enjoyed this book. It has some dark and sad parts, with flawed characters that you're not sure you can like, but with some excellent writing, and an insightful look into Chinese, American, and Cambodian cultures. This is certainly a novel that I will read again; it feels like the kind of book that you'll get more out of on the re-read. Definitely an unforgettable story.
• 
  Lee Anne

  Anyone who knows me, and my reading habits, will know right away my problem with this book: NO CHAPTERS. It's divided into a handful of segments, so I set myself a goal of reading 25 pages a day, and for the most part, I was able to stick with it.
  
  Hattie, widowed Chinese-American, lives a lonely life with dogs, painting, and the occasional interaction with friends, in New England. Local do-gooder pushy Christians move a Cambodian family into a trailer on the marshy land that Hattie sees out her windows. Of course, Hattie becomes involved in their lives. Meanwhile, Carter, the scientist and great lost love of her youth, returns to town and starts charming the local old ladies and young alike.
  
  I liked Hattie, and her meddling in the lives of the Chhungs built in a realistic way. Carter I found to be kind of a dick, with his boat building and yoga skills and guitar teaching. He was a walking Whole Foods customer/NPR tote bag carrier of the ilk that sets my teeth on edge. The majority of the story is told from Hattie's view, with one chunk told by the teenage Cambodian girl who is the source of all the book's action, and one from the estranged husband of the annoying Christian woman who tries to "save" teenage Sophy, with calamitous results. Each character has a very distinct voice. 9/11 occurs at some point during the narrative, and while it creeps into everyone's thoughts, it thankfully doesn't take over the whole story. Kind of like how it felt in real life, for those of us not living in NYC at the time.
  
  It definitely wasn't my favorite of Jen's novels, but I did like it.
• 
  Erin

  I wanted to read this because my library has it catalogued as "Vintage Contemporary," which I think means that high school students in the future might be made to read it, but I'm not sure. I ended up listening to the audio edition on 1 & 1/4 speed, so I couldn't highlight the quotes I wanted to, & there were a number of them. The writing style is very lyrical & speaks a lot to the American immigrant experience (even written a few years before the ugly family separations at the US southern border) & to life experience in general in Early Old Age, which is where I would place Hattie, the main character, and life in a small town, which actually doesn't match my experience of living in a small town. Maybe my home town wasn't small enough.
  
  The most compelling part for me was the description of how evangelical Christianity can scoop someone up & not turn out to be a good thing. It might be obvious to most people that it's not even common for someone to find the Lord & then actually turn into a good person. It's against my training to say this, which is part of why religion can be insidious. It's supposed to make you a good person, or a righteous person, someone who does what's honest & right, but there certainly are a lot of religious people who are convinced that God wants them to do something dishonest / immoral. That part hit close to home.
  
  I docked it a star because it moves so quietly that I dozed off once at my laptop. I was supposed to be working as well as listening to an audiobook. It's not you, author, it's me. Maybe that's a feature of the book rather than an issue.
• 
  Jo

  I loved the main character, Hattie. My first read of this author but I will remedy that quickly.
  
  Romana Vysatova
  
  In three previous novels and a book of short fiction, Gish Jen draped her characters’ troubles in a mood of antic good humor, then gradually allowed those troubles to reveal themselves. In “Typical American,” readers came to understand, through Jen’s adroit storytelling, the disappointments beneath the resilience of the Chinese immigrants Ralph and Helen Chang; in “Mona in the Promised Land,” Jen gave us the identity struggles of the couple’s American-born daughter. Still more complex were the varieties of emotional experience among the Wong family in “The Love Wife,” whose chorus of voices began with an exuberant clamor and ended up somber, reflective and hushed.
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  This expansiveness helped lend authority to Jen’s tales about the search for a true home in multiethnic America. Her genial family comedies were intimate but never small, and were never only comedies. In an interesting reversal, “World and Town” begins in an entirely different mood. Grief is all over, with a jittery under­tone of suspicion; and the novel’s humor, while plentiful, is most often edged in black.
  
  In the spring of 2001, at age 68, Hattie Kong is mired in “a loneliness almost beyond words” after losing both her husband and her best friend to cancer. A retired high school biology teacher, she’s living alone in an apple-cheeked New England mountain town with the dopey name of Riverlake; her journalist son, Josh, checks in by phone every now and then, their conversations drifting into a mournful silence.
  
  Busying herself with a few hobbies, her three dogs and regular walks with a group of local women, Hattie steels herself to endure mostly empty days. Then comes an inescapable disruption: the arrival of a Cambodian family, newly installed in a double-wide trailer on church-owned property just down the hill from Hattie’s house.
  
  “It’s the world come to town,” she imagines her dead husband saying. “As it will, you know, as it will.” How Hattie and the other townspeople wrestle with their responsibility toward this strange, distressed family determines the course of the novel and dramatizes ideas about identity and acceptance that Jen explored in her earlier books. “It’s always been a question, hasn’t it,” one of Hattie’s walking-­group friends notes. “Whom America can be America for. And who keeps America, America.”
  
  Wanting to help, Hattie finds herself drawn especially to the 15-year-old daughter, Sophy, who gradually discloses some details about her family’s situation. Years ago, her parents, Chhung and Mum, each witnessed the death of a spouse at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. After uniting in a refugee camp, they adopted an orphan boy whom they named Sarun. Sophy and her two sisters were born in America a few years later, though the sisters now live in foster homes, having been banished because of some shameful sin Sophy recently committed, the girl hints darkly. Sarun has grown into a foul-mouthed teenager with ties to an Asian gang. And now there’s a baby boy as well, named Gift because he has arrived, or so Mum believes, as compensation for three sons who died of starvation in Cambodia.
  
  More unsettling to Hattie than this terrible history are what she perceives as its damaging effects. Sophy and Sarun don’t seem to be going to school. Mum works sometimes as a house cleaner, but her intermittent pay is negligible. Chhung, often drunk, argues constantly and sometimes violently with Sarun. Sophy finds a refuge — or is it, Hattie wonders, an indoctrination? — at a fundamentalist Christian church, drawn more toward its promises of instant rewards than to Mum’s passive Buddhist hopes for reincarnation. “She wanted to be reborn into the right life, her real life,” Jen writes of Sophy. “Her old life was just so wrong.”
  
  Even as Hattie cautions Sophy against the hard sell of the church, she’s forced to examine her own motives. Raised in the Chinese port city of Qingdao, she’s the daughter of an American missionary mother and a father descended from Confucius. Shipped off to her mother’s relatives in Iowa at age 17 to escape the threat of the People’s Liberation Army, Hattie has felt ever since like “a person away from herself,” a permanent exchange student, a stranger. Maybe she’s identifying too strongly with Sophy’s yearning for acceptance to counsel her effectively. How is she to balance the Confucian ideal of guan — detachment — with its counterweight, ren, human-heartedness?
  
  Other Riverlake residents view Sophy’s family with less compassion and more suspicion, imagining the newcomers as one more hostile disturbance to their once pristine landscape (similar to the town hall proposals for a new cellphone tower and a sprawling Value-Mart). Yet how pristine was it, exactly? Who’s to blame for the vanishing family farms, the rash of recent thefts, the decline of religious values, the general malaise? By the time the world comes to town with news of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, fear is already a longtime resident.
  
  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 has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other publications.
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  Jacob

  This is a well-intentioned book that doesn't have a reason for existing (if that makes any sense). So much of the book feels rushed, the prose just barrels along trying to get somewhere, rarely giving me a chance to simply savor the stillness of the world. At heart there's a nice story about culture clashes, immigration, what it means to be American, science v. superstition, lifetime loves, and a few other things. None of them really satisfy because the book is all over the place. Also, the author overdoes the "how teenagers talk" dialogue. Seriously, enough with the "likes." Like, we get it.
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  Denise

  Intelligent, beautiful book about the integration of different cultures in individuals, relationships, and a town. It is ostensibly about a woman, Hattie, who has lost her husband and best friend to death and has new neighbors who immigrated from Cambodia. The book can be enjoyed as a story about that and the other goings on in her town.
  
  This book is much bigger than that story though. It elegantly weaves the experience of being an outsider to a new culture and the integration of new cultures into all individuals who interact outside their own culture. The title is perfect. What a wonderful book for the current world environment.