SOURCE: "Enigma Variations," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXVIII, Nos. 1 & 2, January 17, 1991, pp. 31-3.

Towers is an American educator, novelist, and critic. In the following excerpt, he observes that, although Boyle's satire is "more farcical than witty," East Is East is a funny book, particularly in its portrayal of the protagonist, Hiro Tanaka.

T. Coraghessan Boyle's third novel, World's End, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1988. It is a long, complex work, a kind of mock history of a Hudson River community that jumps backward and forward from the 1660s to the 1960s. Often satirical, full of grotesque and comically horrendous incidents, World's End is reminiscent in tone of John Barth's densely written historical pastiche, The Sot-Weed Factor, though Boyle's prose is far more readable. His new novel, East Is East, is shorter than World's End and more topical, dealing as it does with...