rev. of Typical American by Gish Jen

There's comedy in Gish Jen's
Typical American, comedy tempered in wry and refreshing ways. It's the story of a big-eared, bumbling Chinese boy who makes his way in America almost in spite of himself: unassimilated and adrift in an indifferent Manhattan, he is rescued by a long-lost sister, gets a Ph.D. in engineering, and then casts aside the security of tenure and a house in the suburbs for a risky venture in the world of fast food. Jen's prose is iridescent, more fleet even than the crazily changing world that her characters move in, and there's a wisdom in this novel that is serendipitous and moving at the same time. "Life heaves these things at us, chance gifts from its green waves," the narrator tells us, speaking of the advent of an unexpected love in the form of a middle-aged man with hemorrhoids. There are gifts, but mostly Jen's characters learn sorrier truths: "He was not what he made up his mind to be. A man was the sum of his limits: freedom only made him see how much so. America was
no America." And yet this novel does much more than puncture the American Dream. True, the family-owned "Chicken Palace" founders, quite literally; and perhaps the fact that not even the most carefully cultivated family and cultural ties cannot hold where the ground is fundamentally unsteady is what makes this tale "typically American." But the warm humor of Jen's narrator will win any reader over to the odd magic that radiates when worlds collide.