Word: jens
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While Harvard normally doesn’t utilize specific defensive assignments, the Crimson elected to shadow Henderson by shifting captain midfielder Kate Gannon to the right back. The team also succeeded in effectively neutralizing a strong Husky midfield thanks to junior midfielder Jen McDavitt and senior midfielder Shelley Maasdorp...
...novel The Love Wife, about the fragile, polyracial Wong family, Jen moves one generational step down the immigrant experience. Those children once fresh off the boat are now grown up, with families of their own, bigger houses, dead parents. But far from being settled by the security of the suburbs, the immigrant's essential question?who am I??has only been blurred by blended families and interracial marriage. It's not a question that can be answered by biology or by citizenship papers. The Wongs' teenage daughter Lizzy, adopted as an abandoned baby, complains that no one knows exactly...
...versus suburban American mother, with a slightly bemused, slightly excited Carnegie in the middle. With his dry engineer's wit?he compares his "va-va-vavoomy" wife to an Aeroflot plane and means it as a compliment?Carnegie is the closest thing this shifting novel has to a protagonist. (Jen divides the narration among her five characters, each offering rejoinders in separate paragraphs. It's a clever effect, even if it sometimes feels like a staged reading of a new play that is still a revision away from completion.) Carnegie, along with Lizzy and precocious nine-year-old Wendy...
...author makes the subtext of that question clear: in an America of blonde Wongs, will the pull of the "natural" undermine what has been constructed by love? Jen is the least heavy-handed of authors, and she lets her characters, in their carefully crafted voices, find their own way out of the identity puzzle she's placed before them. Jen's fans might miss the controlled, sardonic tone of earlier novels like Typical American, but fragments of it still surface, as when Carnegie meditates on prejudice: "Americans believe all racism is a problem. Or at least a lot of Americans...
...Humor has long been Jen's stock in trade, but what sets The Love Wife above her earlier work is its emotional breadth, its desire to understand and love all of its disparate characters. It's as if Jen is suggesting that in a blurred and blended world, we'll need open hearts to accept fractured identities, our own and others', instead of being forced to choose one side or the other, the natural or the constructed. After all, as even Mama Wong admits in the end, "nothing is natural...