The Nation, June 5th, 1989
TRIPMASTER MONKEY: His Fake Book. By Maxine Hong Kingston. Ah fred A . Knopf- 340 pp. $19.95. We won't get much of anywhere with Tripmaster Monkey unless we understand that Maxine Hong Kingston is playing around like a Nabokov with the two cultures in her head. In Ada, by deciding that certain wars, which were lost, should have been won, Nabokov rearranged history to suit himself. There were Russians all over North America, making trilingual puns. This odd world was a parody of Russian novels. In Tripmaster Monkey, America in the 1960s is looked at through the lens of a half-dozen Chinese nov...
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