[In the his review of Griever: An American Monkey King in China, Trachtenberg states that the novel is strengthened by Vizenor's use of language.]

"Imagination is the real world," claims the mournful clown Griever de Hocus, "all the rest is bad television." Griever, hero of Gerald Vizenor's second novel [Griever: An American Monkey King in China], is a Native American of mixed blood who abruptly appears as one of an ill-assorted group of American teachers at a Chinese university in Tianjin. Here his trickster heritage of tribal folklore and myth, not to mention his readiness to dream, helps him to cope with a socialist cadre and the closed society it monitors. For despite the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, China remains suspicious of foreign devils. At the same time, it struggles with population control and welcomes modernization in the form of plastics, dermabrasion and Western venture capitalism.

Griever screams his rage at these responses into what he calls "panic holes" or turns it into playful wisdom in the manner of the monkey kings that populate China's myths of the poor and oppressed. Like the monkey kings, other animals—bears, bats, spiders, even mosquitoes—are also seen by Griever to help shape human conduct. And so, with a pet rooster for a companion, he follows their lead, playing basketball with hogs and liberating both chickens and political prisoners. Later, he disrupts the opening of an extravagant French restaurant and begins a brief affair with a local translator, a dalliance that leads to tragic consequences when it is discovered by her sinister father, a chain-smoking bureaucrat who conceals his contempt for Westerners behind a snakelike smile. Among the other figures Griever encounters are an enigmatic Russian painter who protects his hands with white mittens while serving a prison sentence hauling coal and an actor-sage who preserves Griever's history on a picture scroll that introduces his adventures with a cloudy but comic shrewdness that sets the tone for much of the novel.

Like his hero, Mr. Vizenor attempts to overcome the stale political realities of a Communist state through the renewal of language. For the characters as well as the reader, his world is laid out like-brush strokes in an ink painting.

It is technology, however, rather than metaphor that finally determines the outcome of the novel. And after a climactic carnival, the story's magical disregard for time and space collapses under the weight of a high-tech escape from the mainland. Griever's often burlesque encounters, like his visionary impulses, reflect his desire to escape rather than confront China's dusty streets and oppressive social conditions. Thus his opposition to injustice eventually dissolves into a mere expression of personal vexation. The real arena for Griever's wild history is poetic dreamscape.

Though grounded in the author's experience as a teacher in China and in extensive historical references that are scrupulously identified in an epilogue, the novel gains its strength more from associations of color and from the play of words than from bare facts. Beyond our need for them, words, as Griever realizes, need us to hold down a sense of place. They also need to take off on their own. When they do, this modestly experimental, often luminous novel, which won the 1986 Illinois State University/Fiction Collective Award, evokes a world that does not mirror but parallels our own.