Critical Essay | Critical Review by Andrew Rosenheim

SOURCE: "A Crusoe in Georgia," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4590, March 22, 1991, p. 19.

Rosenheim is an American novelist and critic. In the following review of East Is East, he praises Boyle's vivid, humorous style.

T. Coraghessan Boyle writes a rich and masterful prose which enhances his visceral attachment to the story he tells. In East Is East, Hiro Tanaka is half Japanese, half American, bastard product of a hippie guitarist's union with a Tokyo bar hostess. Embittered by a Japanese childhood spent being ostracized as a half-breed, Hiro heads West, lured by the promise implicit in America's composition: "polyglot tribe, mutts and mulattoes … you could be one part Negro, two parts Serbo-Croatian and three parts Eskimo and walk down the street with you head held high".

This is not the America he finds. Jumping ship—"a sixty-eight-foot drop from the bridge to the water"—Hiro swims to...
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