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Gilbert H. Muller. New Strangers in Paradise:
The Immigrant
Experience and Contemporary American 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. Muller discusses some forty novels and numerous
short stories in a survey of post-Holocaust, Chicano, Latino
Caribbean, African Caribbean, and Asian American fiction. While
the book works fine as a survey, Muller 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 of radicalized modernity (The Consequences of
Modernity), Muller shows how immigrant fiction has radicalized
American democracy.
The shifting contours of immigrant identity, as people of color
redefine the relationship of the Third World to the First World and
of the margin to the center, promote the radicalized version of
American democracy that I hope to elucidate in this study. (9)
The postcolonial directions of this statement -- specifically the
reference to people of color redefining margin to center -- make
problematic the inclusion of post-Holocaust fiction. To prove his
conception of a radicalized American democracy, Muller 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 1959. The small
pattern is in the figure of the "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 of being in America yet 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 both 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 Muller 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 of American literature, but in constructing an overarching
commonality, he overrides race.
The book's triumph is in Muller's discrete exemplifications of
exile, and in the extraordinary variety of his 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 Tripmaster Monkey,
as well as work by other Asian American writers -- for example,
Filipino writers Jessica Hagedorn and Bienvenido Santos, Indian
writer Bharati Mukherjee, and Vietnam-born writer Lan Cao.
Another strong point is Muller's 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 of his theorizing is his idea that
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' Continental Drift.
Says Muller: "By constructing the slowly converging narratives of
a 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 the
immigrant experience is still in process, that it definitely is
part of the evolving story of America, and -- if only for the
space of this book -- we feel its elusive nature within our grasp.
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