[In the following review, Krich gives mixed reviews of Monsieur Teste in America and Other Instances of Realism. He lauds Codrescu's mastery of American idiom, but faults his overuse of simile.]

"America can be taken for granted," counsels Andrei Codrescu near the outset of his latest prose flight. "The obvious is very serious about itself here." The point can hardly be argued in a country where morning papers carry headlines like "Study Reveals Unreality May Be Good for You." It is with healthy doses of such medicine that the Romanian-born poet seeks to treat his adopted homeland. If these stories are termed "instances of realism" that's only because this eternal emigre views American reality as the outdated passport each new arrival carries in his vest pocket. As in his weekly musings for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Mr. Codrescu succeeds in carving out his place as an American voice by failing to heed his own advice. In his work, not a single advertising jingle is taken for granted, the obvious is subverted through carefully aimed barrages of obscurity and no punditry is ever handled more seriously than a trip to the 7-Eleven.

Still, this volume will baffle a listening audience who have come to expect a cross between Andy Rooney and Andre Gide. Out of artistic integrity or self-indulgence, Mr. Codrescu chooses here to abandon mass taste, along with linear thought and most literary conventions. "He was irony, she was subjective mysticism" is about as much character development as we get. While Monsieur Teste in America offers copious servings of poetic observation, it skimps on the everyday detail that makes Mr. Codrescu's radio musings so affecting.

The title novella in this collection of short fiction offers an intriguing premise. On his 29th birthday, Mr. Codrescu summons Monsieur Teste, the Paul Valery creation who represents his intellectual conscience, to help him make sense—or better yet, nonsense—of American symbology. But premises are mere pretense, as is writing about how all writing is pretense, and Mr. Codrescu's dialogue soon makes the two alter egos sound like dueling Zen roshis: "'The point is that you can't trust the world with your understanding of it.' 'But how then … can you entrust the world to your understanding?'" The story meanders off into the birth of a hermaphroditic love-child named Maximum, a discourse on "crypto-morons" and the cataloguing of American schools of poetry in the form of a luncheon menu. ("Aktup, Metabolism, the Bowel Movement and Syllogism. All have me as one of the founders.") It comes as no shock when the piece concludes about Mr. Codrescu's European shadow, "I had learned nothing from him and he who knew everything had taught nothing."

In "Samba de los Agentes," the ramblings and cadence of a Colombian immigrant named Jose sound suspiciously Slavic. Everyone in Mr. Codrescu's universe, including this ex-cop protagonist, is a poet and knows it. And all gain acceptance in America by sending some packaged piece of their souls to market. "I have an agent, therefore I am," seems to be one of many subtexts in this odd regurgitation of the crime story genre. The six shorter pieces in the collection are scattershot affairs united solely through the use of female narrators who are hip, sassy and, once again, familiarly literary in their obsessions. The only voice individuated from the author's is faint indeed, emanating from the disembodied spirit of a spacey grad student channeled through a Brooklynese medium named Madame Rosa.

Like Nabokov's, Mr. Codrescu's greatest strength lies in his outsider's appreciation for the succulence of American idioms. Where language is reinvented daily on billboards, it offers liberation from the chains of connotation. "Contagious words imbued with mass-market meanings like a sponge full of ink crowded my mind to dictate their grammar to me!" the narrator confesses. "The words of America's language brought me an incalculable dowry."

Unlike that strain of American writing that seeks authenticity through spareness, Mr. Codrescu proves he's comfortable with the American idiom by taking colloquialisms out for every possible spin. For him, English is not a tool chest but a toy box—and there is playing in every page here. By now, Mr. Codrescu has become a master at mixing ontological speculation with such random bits of Americana as "flying K-Mart lawn chairs." But the author remains too enamored of purple prose for purpleness's sake. "My dreams are dotted with the dance of psychopatia sexualis in the graveyard of the planet," is one of many sentences that read like bad sendups of beatnik prosody. And Mr. Codrescu would do well to sign up for the 12-step recovery program at Simile Addicts Anonymous. A sampling: New York is said to lie "under the general strike like an actress under a Foreign Legionnaire"; "Vague regrets coursed through him like phosphorus through protozoa"; "'I'm stuffed up with thoughts like a swan with pomegranates'"; "Truth sits in an autobiography like a bird dog in an underground hospital."

At this rate, America will need Andrei Codrescu the way a cement mixer needs a parakeet. Monsieur Teste in America opens with the author's admission that he's "bored in heaven"—and what follows is both a celebration and a frantic evasion of that delicious fate that unites the assimilated and the lunatic. Perhaps Mr. Codrescu can't admit aloud that there's as little to becoming an American as he feared—or that, for all his wealth of associations, America may yet prove too small a subject.