Joe Jenkins
Beyond The Pancakes
Crime in New York City is falling year on year – which parallels, curiously, the common complaint that the Big Apple is losing its buzz – but there is little chance that racial paranoia will subside. The film director Spike Lee has made a career of this conflict, homing in on race tensions in Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever. But with Mona in the Promised Land, her second novel, Chinese-American writer Gish Jen is at once more subtle and more adventurous than Lee, exploring territory beyond the immediate (and predictable) clash of cultures faced by an immigrant Chinese family living in a New York City suburb.
Jen’s thirteen-year-old heroine, Mona Chang, exercises her right as a second-generation American to explore alternatives to her Chinese upbringing – she wants· to be Jewish. Her Catholic convent-educated mother, Helen, and father, Ralph, are mortified. Mona explains: ‘Jewish is American. American means being whatever you want, and I happened to
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Klara and the Sun as a philosophical fairy-tale, for @Lit_Review.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/our-virtual-friend
I wrote about Kitchenly 434, Alan Warner's unnervingly bizarre & funny tale of 70s Rock shenanigans, in the new issue of @Lit_Review @WhiteRabbitBks https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-butler-saw
Where would you rather be: in an Epicurean garden, in a monastery, or in lockdown? My review of books by John Sellars and Sarah Sands for the @Lit_Review.
@DrJSellars @sarahsands100 @PenguinUKBooks @CityLitWriting @ClassColl #Epicureanism #LiveInSecret
https://literaryreview.co.uk/we-must-cultivate-our-gardens