Saving Fish from Drowning (Tan) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Amy Tan is among our great storytellers. In each of her previous novels, she has seduced readers with the intimate magic of her tale.... Her newest novel, Saving Fish from Drowning...is well paced, as one would expect from Tan. Her lovely and evocative images add charm to the ordinary observation of landscape, in passages that might be dull in lesser hands. The emphasis of Saving Fish from Drowning seems to be humor [and while] the book has clever moments and some good one-liners,...humor is not [Tan's] forte. She has a clunky way with irony, and the sprawling slapstick set pieces at the core of this effort are draggy and inept....The deliberately absurd plot, not moving enough for the kind of elegiac fiction that has made Tan famous and not meaningful enough to pass for allegory, appears to be satire.
Andrew Solomon - New York Times

A superbly executed, good-hearted farce that is part romance and part mystery....With Tan's many talents on display, it's her idiosyncratic wit and sly observations...that make this book pure pleasure.
San Francisco Chronicle

With humor, ruthlessness, and wild imagination, Tan has reaped [a] fantastic tale of human longings and (of course) their consequences.
Elle

(Starred review.) Tan delivers another highly entertaining novel, this one narrated from beyond the grave. San Francisco socialite and art-world doyenne Bibi Chen has planned the vacation of a lifetime along the notorious Burma Road for 12 of her dearest friends. Violently murdered days before takeoff, she's reduced to watching her friends bumble through their travels from the remove of the spirit world. Making the best of it, the 11 friends who aren't hung over depart their Myanmar resort on Christmas morning to boat across a misty lake—and vanish. The tourists find themselves trapped in jungle-covered mountains, held by a refugee tribe that believes Rupert, the group's surly teenager, is the reincarnation of their god Younger White Brother, come to save them from the unstable, militaristic Myanmar government. Tan's travelers, who range from a neurotic hypochondriac to the debonair, self-involved host of a show called The Fido Files, fight and flirt among themselves. While ensemble casting precludes the intimacy that characterizes Tan's mother-daughter stories, the book branches out with a broad plot and dynamic digressions. It's based on a true story, and Tan seems to be having fun with it, indulging in the wry, witty voice of Bibi while still exploring her signature questions of fate, connection, identity and family.
Publishers Weekly

With each successive novel, Tan gets further away from the autobiographical element of her early work. Unfortunately, the characters with whom she replaces friends and ancestors end up shallow and unbelievable. That's especially true in this exasperating saga, where 12 fictional American tourists missing in Burma spar, bond, and have exhibitionist love affairs with all the delicacy of characters in a soap opera. The first-person narration, by the ghost of a Chinese American socialite who planned to lead this art and culture expedition, adds to the listener's frustration, as does the ghost's constant reference to "my friends." While Tan's seriocomic look at American tourists interacting with primitive culture rings true and has one laughing out loud at times, the same effect could have been achieved in a much tighter novel. Even elements that might have heightened awareness and suspense end up suffocated by the idiosyncrasies of characters we'd just as soon forget. Everything has to be neatly ordered, including nearly an hour of tying things up, telling what every character goes on to do with his or her life.
Library Journal

(Adult/High School) Saving Fish from Drowning is based on the real-life disappearance of 12 American tourists in Myanmar. The narrator is Bibi Chen, dealer in Chinese antiquities, who had arranged an art-oriented tour for her friends. When she dies under mysterious circumstances, the others decide to proceed, saying that Bibi will join them "in spirit" —an invitation she accepts. Mostly well-meaning, but ignorant and naive, the group lands in one hilarious situation after another due to cultural misunderstandings. On a lake outing, they are kidnapped and taken to a hidden village where a rebel tribe waits for the Younger White Brother, who will make them invisible and bullet-proof and enable them to recover their land. They believe that they've found him in 15-year-old Rupert, an amateur magician. The tour group consists of 10 adults and 2 adolescents, some pillars of the community and some decidedly not, but all rich, intelligent, and spoiled. Bibi, feisty and opinionated, uncovers their fears, desires, and motives, and the shades of truth in their words. As the novel progresses, they become more human and less stereotypical, changing as a result of their experiences. Although Tan also satirizes the tourist industry, American Buddhism, and reality TV, her focus is on the American belief that everyone everywhere plays by the same rules. An extremely funny novel with serious undercurrents. —Sandy Freund, Richard Byrd Library, Fairfax County, VA
School Library Journal

Tan's ambitious fifth novel is a ghost's story (though not a ghost story), about an American tourist party's ordeal in the Southeast Asian jungles of Myanmar (formerly Burma). Its narrator is Bibi Chen (whose relation to the story's complex provenance is discussed in a brief prefatory note): a 60-ish California art collector/dealer and sometime travel guide, whose unexplained violent death limits her to joining the members of an American art tour "in spirit" only. She's a major presence, however, among such varied traveling companions as Chinese-American matron Marlena Chu and her preadolescent daughter Esme; biologist Roxanne Scarangello and her younger husband Dwight Massey (a behavioral psychologist); a florist who produces specially bred tropical plants and his teenaged son, an ardently liberal rich girl and her sexy lover, a gay designer pressed into service as de facto tour master, and several others-the most interesting of whom is TV celebrity dog-trainer Harry Bailley (who has eyes for Marlena, and whose name slyly alludes to that earlier portrayal of motley travelers who discover one another's unbuttoned humanity: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales). The strength here is Tan's clever plot, which takes off when 11 of the dozen tourists (sans Harry, who's ill) enter the jungle, cross a rope bridge that subsequently collapses and find themselves stranded among a "renegade ethnic tribe" who mistake 15-year-old Rupert Moffett for a "god" capable of rendering them invisible to Myanmar's brutal military government. Their disappearance becomes an international cause celebre, cultural misunderstandings entangle and multiply, and some fancy narrative footwork brings the tale to a richly ironic conclusion. Alas, Tan (The Bonesetter's Daughter, 2001, etc.) offers much more-ongoing discursive commentary from Bibi's post-mortem perspective, and scads of historical and ethnographic detail about Burma's storied past and Myanmar's savage present. The author's research ultimately smothers her story and characters. A pity, because this vividly imagined tale might very well have been her best yet.
Kirkus Reviews