New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction by Gilbert H. Muller (review)

complement another Greenwood reference work, The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature (1997), edited by Friederike Eigler and Susanne Kord. I highly recommend the purchase ofthis sourcebook for libraries. Reference works ofthis type tend to be expensive, but this resource also would make an excellent addition to departmental and personal libraries. F Gilbert H. Müller. New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and ContemporaryAmerican Fiction. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999. 270p. Tomas N. Santos University of Northern Colorado This book is for those who wish to incorporate immigrant literature into their courses or who seek a good introduction to contemporary immigrant fiction. Müller discusses some forty novels and numerous short stories in a survey ofpostHolocaust , Chicano, Latino Caribbean, African Caribbean, and Asian American fiction. While the book works fine as a survey, Müller tries to do more with it. Muller's thesis is that postwar immigrant fiction has reshaped the American literary landscape by revaluing identity and creating new historical intersections. Starting from Giddens' idea that diversity, instability, and difference are positive rather than negative forces in the construction ofradicalized modernity (The Consequences ofModernity), Müller shows how immigrant fiction has radicalized American democracy. The shifting contours ofimmigrant identity, as people ofcolor redefine the relationship of the Third World to the First World and of the margin to the center, promote the radicalized version ofAmerican democracy that I hope to elucidate in this study. (9) The postcolonial directions ofthis statement—specifically the reference to people of color redefining margin to center—make problematic the inclusion of postHolocaust fiction. To prove his conception ofa radicalized American democracy, Müller has to justify placing Bellow, Singer, and Ozick in with Mukherjee, Garcia , and Kincaid. To do so, he has to weave patterns both great and small. The great pattern is the postwar, postmodern condition from which multicultural and nomadic movements emerge and through which we gain perspective on certain cataclysmic moments: the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban revolution of 1 959. The small pattern is in the figure ofthe "immigrant survivor," the common thread in all the stories. The immigrant survivor is any character who has been victimized by immigration policy, has been displaced and uprooted, suffers the duality 118 -I- ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2001 Reviews ofbeing in Americayet feeling distanced from it, and is marginalized by the dominant culture. Thus, Ozick's Rosa Lublin is not much different from Garcia's Lourdes Puentes for both are caught in the cusp of the historical ebb and flow, and bodi are displaced persons trapped in transnational intersections. But cannot the same thing be said of Puzo's Michael Corleone? The danger here is that in promoting inclusivity Müller risks being essentialist, assimilative, homogenous. His insistence on bringing post-Holocaust fiction in line with ethnic literature is a brave step toward redefining the scope ofAmerican literature, but in constructing an overarching commonality, he overrides race. The book's triumph is in Müllers discrete exemplifications ofexile and in the extraordinaryvariety ofhis selections. The texts he chooses are viable, current, and may be ones we have overlooked. In the section on Asian American fiction, he discovers for us Maxine Hong Kingston's lesser known TripmasterMonkey, as well as work by odier Asian American writers—for example, Filipino writers Jessica Hagedorn and Bienvenido Santos, Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee, and Vietnamborn writer Lan Cao. AnorJier strong point is Müllers adherence to history as both background and the stuff out of which fiction emerges. His coverage is replete with data about immigration law and discriminatory policies. The best part ofhis theorizing is his idea rJiat immigrant fiction is not only a consequence of history, but it also remakes history. His paradigm for contemporary immigrant fiction is Caribbean writer Russell Banks' ContinentalDrift. Says Muller: "By constructing die slowly converging narratives ofa contemporary American migrant and a Haitian immigrant , Russell Banks . . . retells and reinvents the nation's story. By merging interacting cultures, with their colliding myths and histories, he draws attention to the ways in which a hybrid nation is reassembling itself" (232). It's a good notion: that die immigrant experience is still in process, that it definitely is part of the...