Ultimately, Saving Fish From Drowning follows its 12 American sightseers through China and Burma, where they relentlessly misinterpret and misjudge everything around them, while Bibi's frustrated ghost observes and explains their errors for readers' benefit. Oblivious to the culture, language, and beliefs of the people they encounter, the travelers miss nuances, leap to conclusions, fail tests of empathy and discernment, and randomly disperse money or blame when they encounter problems. And as a result, they defile a shrine, make themselves catastrophically ill, fall into one misadventure after another, and eventually helpfully accommodate their own disappearance.
As the narrator, Bibi sometimes offers excuses for their behavior, but as their errors rapidly pile up into a scathing indictment of Americans abroad, the excuses wear thin. Unfortunately, so does the narrative. Tan's detailed prose style is strong and her structure is irresistible; her early-book teasers about the traveling party's fate guarantee readers will go along for the bumpy ride just to find out what happened to them, and every mistake they make along the way provokes another anticipatory flinch. But hundreds of pages of comparisons between the Americans' arrogant presumptions and the real truth become monotonous, the large cast of thinly characterized stereotypes blur together, and Bibi's beyond-the-grave harping just gets in the way. Saving Fish is intermittently a wickedly wry satire, brimming with insight about how cultures and individuals fail to connect, sometimes with harsh consequences. It's also an impressive narrative step up from Tan's previous gorgeous but increasingly samey domestic-exotic dramas, and it's impressively cynical and misanthropic, more like a Chuck Palahniuk novel than like The Joy Luck Club. But all the ambition it adds to Tan's normal strengths would come through clearer with a few subtractions: say, of half the unnecessary characters, a third of the repetitive length, and most of the gimmicks and veils.
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