Gerald Vizenor Critical Essay | Critical Review by Stanley Trachtenberg

SOURCE: "A Trickster in Tianjin," New York Times Book Review, January 10, 1988, p. 18.

In the his review of Griever: An American Monkey King in China, Trachtenberg states that the novel is strengthened by Vizenor's use of language.

"Imagination is the real world," claims the mournful clown Griever de Hocus, "all the rest is bad television." Griever, hero of Gerald Vizenor's second novel [Griever: An American Monkey King in China], is a Native American of mixed blood who abruptly appears as one of an ill-assorted group of American teachers at a Chinese university in Tianjin. Here his trickster heritage of tribal folklore and myth, not to mention his readiness to dream, helps him to cope with a socialist cadre and the closed society it monitors. For despite the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, China remains suspicious of foreign devils. At the same time, it struggles with population control and...
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