Tan's epic of mother, daughter, and sex

The Valley of Amazement

nolead begins By Amy Tan

Ecco. 608 pp. $29.99

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Elizabeth Langemak

Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement is a very long novel with sex at its center, which is to say that it cannot help but also be a novel about nearly everything else.

Radiating from this center are myriad meditations on the nature of power, the role nationality plays in identity, what it means to fail or succeed as a mother, the twin difficulties of a loved one's absence or presence, and whether it is possible for anyone to be truly liberated or entrapped.

Given its subject matter, and its nearly 600-page span, epic is a fitting word for what this book boldly attempts.

Set mainly in China and spanning 34 years beginning in 1905, The Valley of Amazement is narrated almost entirely by Violet Minturn. Violet is the 7-year-old daughter of American-born Lucia Minturn, part-owner of the Hidden Jade Path, a Shanghai courtesan house. Both Violet and Lucia are impetuous, passionate, and deeply unlucky. Indeed, much of the novel seems aimed at helping each character identify these characteristics not as individual foibles but as family traits.

The book takes an early dramatic turn when Lucia seemingly abandons Violet to be sold into the life of a courtesan. Violet is educated, guided, and otherwise mothered by Magic Gourd, an aging courtesan cast out of the Hidden Jade Path by Lucia years earlier. "Aging" is, of course, a relative and quick-moving term in an economy wherein virginity is one's greatest marketable asset. Violet's defloration is purchased to take place on her 15th birthday, and by the age of 24 she has lived lives within lives. She becomes one of Shanghai's most popular courtesans, but she suffers when she falls in love. Later, she marries and bears a daughter, but is soon after widowed. Each tragedy that befalls her draws yet another parallel between her life and her mother's.

The Valley of Amazement takes its title from a painting Violet finds among her mother's belongings. The painting does not appeal to her aesthetically, yet she keeps it because it seems to be "a riddle" that, when answered, might offer her a relationship with the father she has never known. Young Violet looks at this painting and cannot tell "whether the rain was coming, or the sky was clearing." The clouded, ragged valley it depicts is a symbol of her complicated present, and also of her hopes for a more simplified future.

Tan's depictions of the even more intricate riddle of sex also vary between complicated and simple. Some of these representations lie directly on the surface of the courtesan lifestyle, such as the debatable extent to which sex is an exchange of power between men and women. As the plot relies on intercourse, literally, between American and Chinese men and women, she also positions readers to examine the manner in which the exotic defines the erotic. As always, Tan's best work focuses on what women choose to do both to and for each other. Sex sharpens this issue to a point that draws blood.

Readers of Tan's earlier work will be familiar with this book's troubled mother-daughter relationships, and multigenerational narration. Lucia Minturn, silent for more than 400 pages, narrates three chapters near the novel's end. These chapters offer satisfying explanations of Lucia's choices regarding herself and her daughter, and also cast Lucia as a sort of mirror image of a daughter who has grown to be very much like her despite their separation.

If Lucia's narration is gratifying, however, it largely achieves this effect by appearing rather late, at a time when Lucia's story has begun to feel less withheld than maybe simply lost to history. After Lucia's chapters, the novel moves quickly, as though attempting to compensate Violet for her deeply troubled life by thrusting a hasty bouquet of complicated pleasures into her hands. Much action is condensed into a relatively small number of pages, and Tan makes use of the epistolary form to further speed the novel's end.

In finishing a particularly long novel, a reader often feels a mimetic experience of the narrator's sense of closure. As I neared this book's end, I found myself asking questions about what it means to be satisfied, and whether the brief, yet deeply moving moment Violet's story ends on is adequate compensation for such a lengthy journey. Perhaps the greatest strength of this novel is that as the last pages are turned, Violet may be asking this question, as well.

Author Appearance: Amy Tan, "The Valley of Amazement"

7:30 p.m., Friday, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St.

Tickets: $25

Information: 215-567-4341 and www.freelibrary.org.EndText