SOURCE: "Into the White Continent," in New York Times Book Review, August 9, 1987, p. 7.

In the following review, Lee suggests that the essays in The European Tribe are too brief for "sustained analysis" since Phillips's focus is too broad.

Part travelogue, part cri de coeur, [The European Tribe, a] short book of essays, records a year-long odyssey through the multiracial Europe of the 1980's. Caryl Phillips, a young British novelist of African-Caribbean descent, seems ideally suited to explore themes of national and racial identity, exile and cultural disorientation. An Oxford graduate who grew up in white working-class London feeling like "a transplanted tree that had failed to take root in foreign soil," Mr. Phillips embarked on a voyage of self-discovery after a trip back to the Caribbean had convinced him that, willy-nilly, he belonged, at least culturally, to Europe. "I knew," he writes in his introduction, "I would have...