Just finished Saving Fish from Drowning. The second half is just as interesting and unexpected as the first! In this portion, our travelers encounter some members of the Paduang-Karen tribe, an ethnic hill tribe living in the Burma jungle. Without giving too much away, some members of the tribe are the last to see to see the tourists before their disappearance. Anthropological imagination is an obvious pleasure in this part of the story—you’ve probably seen pictures of the Paduang women, who wear rings on their neck so that they appear unnaturally elongated—and Tan has a field day inventing the patchwork religion practiced by this fictional splinter group of Karen. But lest anyone accuse Tan of poking fun at the natives, this portion of the novel also spends just as much effort skewering the global media circus that erupts over the mystery of the missing tourists. An image- and sound bite-driven culture can be just as false and misdirected as the most bizarre of religions, Tan implies. Who’s really the “primitive” or the brute in this scenario?

Four novels and nearly two decades after The Joy Luck Club, Saving Fish from Drowning shows how much more amazing work Amy Tan still has in store. Throughout the latter book, I was constantly struck by how different it is from her breakthrough novel. Both works may be narrated by Chinese women living in San Francisco, but the similarities end there. Where Joy Luck’s tales of mothers and daughters dwell heavily on the past, Saving Fish from Drowning’s drama of sudden disappearance emphasizes the present. Where Joy Luck pulls at the heartstrings, Saving Fish speaks to the mind—and really to a reader’s sense of humor! Indeed, as if to acknowledge a deliberate break with the defining aspects of Joy Luck and several other of her earlier works, in Saving Fish from Drowning Tan includes a Chinese mother and her daughter among its cast of characters—but in this novel the pair’s ethnicity rarely plays into the plot, except when discrepancies between their own thoughts and how others view their supposedly “inscrutable” beauty illustrate the ridiculous preconceptions and faulty interpretations that drive the book’s plot.

With Saving Fish from Drowning, Amy Tan has accomplished a most remarkable thing—a modern adventure with a primordial setting, and a social satire with a generous heart. I wonder whether we’ll find these themes developing in her other novels? Let me report next week on The Hundred Secret Senses…

I am so excited that Amy Tan will be reading for Inprint next month! I'm right in the middle of  Saving Fish From Drowning, her most recent (2005) novel, and simply can't put it down. The book follows twelve American tourists entering Burma from the China border, in a recreation of the ancient trade routes that linked the territories for centuries before twentieth-century politics divided the region. The journey should be a trip of a lifetime, as the travelers are supposed to be some of the first Westerners in decades to make that over-land entry, but real revelations on this tour turn out to be what happens to the travelers themselves, who disappear shortly into their time in Burma. If there is any doubt about the doomed nature of the trip, Tan clues us into the imminent disaster through the voice of Bibi Chen, the socialite and arts patron who had planned the trip but who dies under mysterious circumstances before the novel begins. Narrating from the dead is always a catchy device (one thinks of  Sunset Boulevard or, for a more recent literary example, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones), and Tan manages to invest the performance with a liveliness and distinctiveness that is all her own. Bibi Chen is irreverent, adroit, and worldly; her description of the twelve tourists, their various reasons for joining the tour, and the ways in which they comport themselves during it is a hilarious but still fond portrait of class privilege, American naivete, and fumbling liberal good intentions.

Some readers may detect striking similarities between the novel and George Orwell's great essay, "Shooting an Elephant." Not only do both works take place in Burma (arguably constituting two landmarks in a literary subgenre of Western writing on Asia), but both works portray characters buffeted about by social and historical forces over which they have no control. It's this ensemble cast of tourists that is the real meat of the novel, although readers seeking a glimpse into Burma--still largely closed to Western journalism---won't be disappointed. Tan sketches wonderfully evocative vignettes of places like Muse, the border town between Burma and China. (Indeed, in one colorful scene at a market in Muse, one character, a graphic designer, employs a "fast line drawing style" to record his travel impressions that is clearly a visual symbol of Tan's own literary work. "Knowing what the features were--that was as much the artistry as executing the drawing.") Like Ann Patchett's Bel Canto or The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara 'Kingsolver (Tan's former bandmate in the literary rock band, The Rockbottom Remainders), Saving Fish from Drowning is that winning combination of geographical exoticism, multicultural encounter, and revelation of character that makes us want to explore our own preconceptions even as we surrender ourselves to the pleasures of masterful storytelling.