The Decline of the Adventuress

Real life is still full of gossip-worthy adventuresses sleeping their way to the top, but novels and TV shows? Not so much anymore.

There has been much speculation over the reasons for the decline of the significance of the novel in our culture.

One reason is of course simply because we are richer and more technologically advanced, so we might as well watch stories told in film or TV versions rather than do the work of making up the picture in our heads.

For example, I recently picked up William Styron’s acclaimed novel Sophie’s Choice. It was quite good, but after 100 pages or so, I put it down rather than spend another ten or twenty hours finishing it. If I was that fascinated with the story, I’d be better off spending three hours watching the equally acclaimed movie version, with its famous acting performances by Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. After all, Streep and Kline are better at reciting Styron’s dialogue on camera than I am at imagining the line readings in my own head.

Another reason is the growing feminization of fiction as males lose interest in reading stories about other guys, when they could be the hero of their own shoot-em-up video games.

Finally, ever-increasing segments of humanity have managed to get themselves increasingly off-limits for being portrayed without appropriate reverence in fiction or even TV commercials.

For example, consider the decline of that once popular character: the adventuress, such as Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, or the real-life Lola Montez.

Nowadays, the mere word “adventuress” is considered in “dated” poor taste.

Spellcheckers now seldom recognize the plural “adventuresses” and try to change it to “adventurous:” e.g. Amelia Earhart or Sally Ride are considered appropriate roles models, and are taking over the word “adventuress,” but Wallis Simpson or Pamela Harriman are best forgotten.

If you are wondering, an “adventuress” would be the main female character of a story primarily aimed at women, while a “femme fatale” is in a story with a male protagonist. Hollywood movies used to abound in memorable femme fatales from Double Indemnity up through 1994’s The Last Seduction. But lately, 2014’s Gone Girl is a rare example.

One reason is because you aren’t supposed to tell fictional stories these days about members of Official Victim Groups, like women, doing bad things. (You can still spread gossip, of course, about real adventuresses, but don’t expect to get too much institutional backing for your novel or movie about one.)

This doesn’t mean that adventuresses have disappeared from real life. For example, for years I’ve been following in the gossip columns the further adventures of one of the all-time greats.

All this came to mind from reading the following book review in the Washington Post, which sounds like a remarkably boring version of a roman a clef about the actual world-class old-fashioned adventuress whose identity I will reveal and whose story I will tell after the paywall.

But this new novel is less about the Asian immigrant’s machinations to climb the social ladder in America than about rich white people’s racist and sexist microaggressions toward her.

Kathy Wang’s novel is an antidote for our global dissatisfaction

“The Satisfaction Café” is an upper crust satire about a woman who wonders if there could be a way to create more happiness in life.

June 20, 2025

Review by Ron Charles

On the first page of “The Satisfaction Café,” Kathy Wang writes, “Joan had not thought she would stab her husband.”

I’ve just met Joan, but I already like her spontaneous style. And it turns out, she’s not really such a menace to civil society — or even to husbands. But don’t push her too far.

Joan, the heroine of Wang’s winsome third novel, is a Chinese graduate student at Stanford in the 1970s. Although she ranked at the top of her Taiwanese high school, her parents had no intention of sending her abroad — until her three brothers flamed out. Now, on weekly long-distance phone calls, her miserable mother and philandering father hound her to start making money.

A less-dutiful daughter studying in America might just stop calling home, but “Joan was grateful, as she was a girl and thus not entitled to anything.” At first, she brings that same sense of compliance into her marriage with a handsome Chinese architecture student. …

Watching others grasp the depth of Joan’s resolve is one of the many pleasures of “The Satisfaction Café,” which follows this determined woman decades into the future.

Not long after stabbing and divorcing her husband, Joan marries Bill, a wealthy White man twice her age, which is both a blessing and a challenge. Their unlikely relationship works surprisingly well even while inspiring some of the novel’s finest comedy. …

How does a 25-year-old former grad student adjust to managing a large house of her own? As with everything Joan does, she makes a concerted effort to get along with Bill’s siblings and adult children, but they see nothing but that gulf between him and his young Chinese wife. Regarding her as a threat to the family’s financial security and its genetic purity, they whisper racist jokes and cast her as a gold digger. Bill’s friends don’t hesitate to remind her how much they liked his previous wife.

The presumptuousness of rich people “convinced they were uniquely important” continually flummoxes Joan — and clearly amuses Wang, who also lives in the Bay Area. She has a perfect ear for the whiplash offenses and confidences of this gilded set. After treating her coldly, Bill’s sister suddenly “spoke to Joan as if they’d experienced something significant together, like high school or a stressful cruise.”

Wang mines these tense relationships for the novel’s sharpest critique of wealthy people who have faith “that things will always be such a way.” This sort of upper-crust satire could feel stale if not for the fresh way Joan reacts to their micro- and macro-aggressions: She has a scientist’s curiosity about these spoiled folks. “She was interested in snobs,” Wang writes. How do they inhabit the world? What do they eat? Where do they travel to? She finds it incredible that “luck could be distributed not only so randomly but also exponentially.” The privileged life that Bill’s family members consider an expression of their wisdom, hard work and value, Joan knows is just as accidental as her own position.

With increasing concern, she wonders if there could be a way to create more happiness in life. …

Aside from Joan’s opening assault on her first husband — carried out with a caliper! — the plot of “The Satisfaction Café” is relatively muted as it leaps through the decades of Joan’s life. In any case, the real attraction of this novel isn’t its plot but its voice. Ironic but rarely biting, Wang’s narration moves nimbly just above Joan’s perplexed perspective while catching the notes of absurdity and hypocrisy around her. That’s perfect because Joan is always within and without — participating in the culture of wealthy White people but also subjected to it, living in luxury but caught in an undercurrent of condescending comments, glances and expectations.

I wonder if in one of the dramatic highlights of this novel, a white person … touches her hair!

So, who is this Chinese woman who marries into a famously rich and cutting white family based upon? I would guess: a certain Chinese adventuress much less boring than the heroine of the novel, namely …

Paywall here.