SOURCE: "Amy, Angst, and the Second Novel," in San Francisco Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 1, Summer, 1991, pp. 33-4.

In the following review, Gillespie discusses the problem of a second novel and asserts that Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife is both different from her first novel and successful in its own right.

Granted, she has her reasons. When Amy Tan wrote amusingly and tellingly about "Angst and the Second Novel" in a recent Publishers Weekly, she was so sympatico about the frightening game of fiction that it seemed unfair to those who usually call the shots around here: the reviewers. In essence, our Amy defanged all her potential critics, silencing us with the sheer weight of her apprehension, guilt-tripping them in advance.

The Second Novel, she said, is always compared to the first, specially if the first was an unexpected runaway success; and the First Hit Novel is the...