In 1782 in his collection of essays on American life, Letters from an American Farmer, Michel Crevecoeur posed the question, "What then is the American, this new man?" It is a question which has concerned American writers ever since. Tripmaster Monkey; His Fake Book, Kingston's novel of a young ChineseAmerican male roaming the streets of San Francisco in the early 1960s, adds another piece to the emerging picture of what this new man looks like.

Through the antics and diatribes of Wittman Ah Sing, an unemployed would-be-poet full of allusions and illusions, the author poses a number of important questions about the nature of the relation between the individual and his community in America. Walt Whitman, "the poet that his father tried to name him after," once wrote: "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person,/Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse." The...