Yes, we’re back in Amy Tan country. With B_The Hundred Secret Senses_b (358 pages. Putnam. $24.95), Tan has once more produced a novel wonderfully like a hologram: turn it this way and find Chinese-Americans shopping and arguing in San Francisco; turn it that way and the Chinese of Changmian village in 1864 are fleeing into the hills to hide from the rampaging Manchus. Tan ushered readers into this world of a commingled Chinese past and present with her 1989 debut, “The Joy Luck Club.” Critics and readers went wild (and a few years later, so did moviegoers). Coming up with a second book was plainly nerve-racking. “The Kitchen God’s Wife” (1991) was beautifully written–Tan has yet to publish a second-rate sentence–but melodramatic. Some readers wondered if she had extracted everything she could from this territory; perhaps she should move on. But happily, Tan knew better. “The Hundred Secret Senses” doesn’t simply return to a world but burrows more deeply into it, following new trails to fresh revelations.
Tan has always specialized in storytelling and spectacle, and here she doesn’t stint. But the novel is more finely nuanced than her previous two, in part because of the way her narrator shapes its tone and direction. Olivia is a young Chinese-American who moves uneasily between history and the present. She sees her first ghost when she’s 8–a little Chinese girl who demands to play with Olivia’s Barbie doll. “I wasn’t seared,” Olivia remembers. “That was the other thing about seeing ghosts: I always felt perfectly calm, as if my whole body had been soaked in a mild tranquilizer. I politely asked this little girl in Chinese who she was.” But when she grows up, she learns to apply a modern dose of cynicism to what her “hundred secret senses” are telling her. The constant clash of Olivia’s mind and heart keep the plot buoyant, right up to a climax in Changmian village, where Olivia has gone in search of Kwan’s childhood and her own future. With this book, Tan earns back her reputation and then some.
title: “Ghost Story” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-21” author: “Barbara Crumrine”
“The Sixth Sense” combined two genres not ordinarily linked–the ghost story and the tear-jerker. “Stir of Echoes,” based on a 1958 Richard Matheson novel, takes a more predictable turn. It merges the horror genre with the whodunit, revealing that the ghostly girl was murdered. “Echoes” is at its best in its mysterious, genuinely chilling first half. But as the plot kicks in, the hysteria mounts and the explanations start coming, the tension starts to dissipate. Like Bacon’s strenuous attempt to sound working class, the movie tries too hard. Why, in one scene, does little Jake suddenly talk in a deep “Exorcist” voice? It has nothing to do with anything, except Koepp’s desperation. Too bad. This coulda been a contender.
