Or is fun the word? Jen’s novels “Typical American” and “Mona in the Promised Land” have won her a reputation as “lighthearted” and “delightful” (Cynthia Ozick’s adjectives). But Jen uses her ever-ready wit to provide ironic distance from genuinely dark places. Take “Duncan in China,” one of the collection’s two novellas. An assimilated Chinese-American, attracted to “the China of ineffable nobility and restraint,” visits the grim modern-day People’s Republic–a surreal place in itself, where Buddhist piety coexists with post-Orwellian political paranoia. The story’s mood veers from anti-authoritarian comedy to heart-wrenching grotesquerie: in one scene, a tubercular father hopelessly wheedles to get himself and his brutalized young son to America as the boy drunkenly dances on a tabletop.
Jen’s performance isn’t a series of one-liners, but an elaborate balancing act: Chinese and American, painful and funny. When her characters argue–when don’t they?–she doesn’t let the sympathetic ones hog all the good lines. The result: an esthetic whole even greater than the sum of its entertaining parts.
Who’s Irish.Knopf. 208 pages. $22.
