Volume 38, Number 14 · August 15, 1991
Seeing Double
By Patricia Storace
Typical American
by Gish Jen
Houghton Mifflin, 296 pp., $19.95
What Was Mine
by Ann Beattie
Random House, 237 pp., $20.00
Typical American, Gish Jen's poised, unsentimental novel about a Chinese immigrant's life in the United States, is as preoccupied with the notion of pairs, doubles, and the interplay of possibility and limitation as the famous Chinese book of divination, the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Even the typical American of Jen's title is a Chinese immigrant, a man of two names, two cultures, and two languages.
Review, 3990 words
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