The Reception of Amy Tan's Novels: A Historical Survey

Evans, Robert C. "The Reception Of Amy Tan’s Novels: A Historical Survey." Critical Insights: Amy Tan, edited by Kathryn West & Linda Trinh Moser, Salem, 2021, pp. 3-26. The Reception of Amy Tan’s Novels: A Historical Survey by Robert C. Evans [EXCERPT] Academics often forget that the critics who are usually most important, at least initially, in generating interest in an author’s work are reviewers for the popular press. These reviewers are not, typically, academics themselves, but it is their assessments that usually determine whether and how well an author’s books sell and thus reach an interested audience. My purpose in this essay, then, is to survey some examples of how Amy Tan’s six novels were reviewed in the “popular press” when they first appeared.1 As will be seen, although the reviewers who assessed Tan’s works used a wide variety of critical approaches, the ones they most often employed were thematic, archetypal, and formalist. That is, reviewers were often concerned with the themes or topics Tan explored; with the “universal” appeal of her writings; and with the artistic skill her writings did (or did not) exhibit. This survey of the history of Tan criticism can tell us something about the recent history of criticism in general. Reviews of The Joy Luck Club In a review of Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club, Jeffrey Ann Goudie, writing for The Kansas City Star, asserted that the “differences” between the novel’s various characters “blend into a common meaning and the reader is handed back to herself renewed.” This kind of comment was typical in the early reviews of most of Tan’s works. Despite her emphasis on different cultures (especially those of China and the United States), Tan was often seen as achieving, in a way important to archetypal critics, meanings, insights, and impacts that were fundamentally human—that transcended cultural differences. Tan was often seen as writing for and about people in general, in ways readers of all backgrounds could appreciate. Goudie, like many other reviewers, also credited Tan with the artistic ability to create “forceful stories”—stories that genuinely moved readers at deep psychological levels and was intrigued by the themes or ideas Tan explored. Thus, Goudie wrote, “With the teasing simplicity of a fairy tale [the novel] offers riddles: How much truth is there in superstition and superstition in truth? Why are mothers almost always right, if so often for the wrong reasons? And why does it frequently take most of a lifetime for a daughter to realize her mother’s worth?” Again, Goudie’s observations are not limited to Chinese mothers and Chinese daughters but to mothers and daughters in general—a common “archetypal” interest. Tracey Wong, writing for the widely syndicated Gannett News Service began in a way that made her sound at first more interested in cultural differences than in basic “human nature”: “perhaps only Chinese-American women will fully appreciate how genuine” The Joy Luck Club seemed. But then she quickly added, “Even if you’re not Chinese, it’s still engrossing reading.” She did later write that “Amy Tan captures perfectly the tensions between Chinese and American, mother and daughter.” But then again, she returned to an archetypal emphasis on mothers and daughters, and human generations, in general: “I love the dialogue, the way conversations don’t quite intersect and meanings slip through generations; how mothers say one thing and daughters hear another; ultimately, how lessons mothers teach aren’t the lessons daughters learn.” Wong, however, also admired Tan’s talent as a writer: “What makes the stories so moving is that they reveal anguish without sentimentality. . . . Tan writes with a precise ear. Her prose is descriptive and witty without making the first-person narratives seem contrived.” These are the typical concerns of formalist critics, who value first and foremost a writer’s skill in using language. Leslie Carper, in Raleigh, North Carolina’s News and Observer, seemed especially interested in another of Tan’s themes: “Again and again the novel returns to an unshakable belief in luck.” She did seem to think that the novel was less complex and rigorous than it could have been, writing that “this plotless novel conforms nicely to the reassuring sensibilities of myth by being carefully shaped to reinforce a tidy understanding of the world neatly summed up with satisfying conclusions. [The stories in the book] are eminently comforting, the artless prose infinitely readable”—with those last few words exemplifying the kind of comment a formalist would offer. Carper once again combined formalism and archetypal criticism by concluding that “Amy Tan has written a remarkable first novel—one that combines the satisfactions of good storytelling with the warm comfort of a memoir.” Writing for the Orlando Sentinel (in a review widely republished in other papers), Ann Hellmuth also emphasized the The Joy Luck Club’s universal appeal, calling it “a remarkable first novel filled with wisdom, humor, love, and sadness”—not Chinese or Chinese American emotions but emotions any human might feel. Hellmuth, combining thematic and archetypal instincts, concluded that Tan’s book was about “the passing of the baton from one generation to another,” adding that the novel’s “extra power” came “from being grounded in truth”—the kind of comment that deconstructive and postmodernist critics, with their emphasis on thorough-going skepticism, might consider hopelessly naïve, but the kind of comment most newspaper writers and readers seemed unembarrassed by. Formalist impulses were immediately present in a very detailed review written for The Philadelphia Inquirer by Roz Spafford, who began by calling the novel “an extraordinary book, beautifully crafted without being self-conscious, deeply felt without being sentimental.” Her focus on beauty, craft, and balance was the typical preoccupation of a formalist critic, as was her later comment that the book’s opening scene “required a steady hand, unusual in a first novelist, but. . . completely successful.” Formalism was similarly implicit in her comment that each story within the book “works as a story on its own, as well as an illuminating complement to the others”—the kind of emphasis on a carefully balanced structure any formalist would embrace. After summarizing the plot in detail, Spafford returned to formalism again when she wrote that Tan deftly handles the difficult matter of language. When the mothers speak English in their daughters’ narratives, they use the inventive, rudimentary patois they have evolved in America. But when they switch to Chinese, and when they are telling their own stories, their speech is powerful, poetic. Tan thus does justice to their insights, to the lyric force of their language, at the same time contrasting it with the limits of their “actual” English. Spafford, however, in another typically formalist move, was also willing to find fault if she thought Tan had somewhat failed as an artist. She wrote that because the mothers are translated in this way, their voices, though not their stories, are very similar. The daughters, too, speak in indistinguishable phrasings. On one level, these resemblances are appropriate, since the daughters are just beginning to recognize their own power; on another, their stories would have had more impact had there been more variety in the voices. But Spafford could also operate as a historical critic, as when she wrote that Tan’s accomplishment in The Joy Luck Club is “not only the precision with which she details the missed connections and moments of comprehension between mother and daughter” (an archetypal assessment) but also “her skill at linking history and personal life” (a comment that combines formalism with an interest in and respect for history). Spafford also admired how skillfully “Tan details the personal cost not only of war but also in terms of societal patterns,” examples of which she lists, bringing a sociological dimension into her review. Her later comments, however, were especially historical in their emphasis: If there is anything unsatisfying about Tan’s book, it is that the daughters’ concerns are relentlessly personal. Though they and their husbands were growing up in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, there seems to have been no Vietnam; there is no job discrimination except by their partner-husbands; no racism except from their husbands’ mothers. It is as if Tan, writing about her own generation, finds it difficult to know about herself what she must know about her mother—that personal life is shaped by public events. These are the sorts of comments that might especially come from a so-called “new historicist” critic, since such critics are particularly interested in the interactions between literary texts and multiple historical contexts. But even Spafford ends as an archetypal critic might, asserting that “The Joy Luck Club enables all of us to reflect on what we have inherited and passed on, what we misunderstand and miscommunicate, how all our lives are the elaborately detailed consequence of sweeping forces, visible and invisible.” …