[In the following review, Yardley observes that Mona in the Promised Land includes likable characters and interesting stories, but asserts that the novel as a whole is disappointing because of inconsistencies in the narrative voice.]

Gish Jen's first novel, Typical American, published five years ago, is by any reasonable standard a rare accomplishment: mature, subtle, knowing, compassionate and, by no means least, funny. It tells the story of two Chinese immigrants to America, a brother and sister, whose determination to become “typical American” leads them into any number of difficulties and adventures, in the process of which a good deal is revealed not merely about them but also about us.

Typical American was reviewed with the enthusiasm it deserved and sold moderately well, but was swamped—along with a number of other good books all dealing, in their different ways, with much the same subject—by the stupendous success of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Since then even more books about the Chinese-American (or Chinese-Canadian) experience have been published, to the extent that a substantial literary sub-genre has emerged, one to rival the fiction from the 1950s and 1960s by Bellow, Malamud, Roth et al. about Jewish-American life.

To what if any extent Typical American is autobiographical is not clear, though probably it is so more in point of view than in specific detail. By contrast Jen's second novel, Mona in the Promised Land, fairly trumpets its origins in the author's own experience. This is not bad in and of itself—the impulse to tell one's own story, however transmogrified, is at the heart of the novelist's art—but it is limiting, especially when it results in coming-of-age fiction.

It is a matter of no small interest, remarked upon in this space with regard to a number of earlier books, that the coming-of-age novel is no longer strictly men's stuff—that women have staked their claim to the territory and that this is, for reasons too obvious to require elaboration, on the whole a good thing. But all such books published by women in recent years have also made the point, however unwittingly, that women are liable to make the same mistakes and fall into the same temptations as men, that adolescence is adolescence regardless of which sex undergoes it and that fictional accounts of the experience tend to suffer from the same artlessness and self-absorption.

All of which is an admittedly circumlocutory way of getting around to the unhappy truth that Mona in the Promised Land is, to put it charitably, disappointing. Opening the novel with genuine anticipation and enthusiasm, I found myself within only a few pages lamenting some essential choices Jen had made and regretting that 300 pages of the result lay ahead. The redeeming quality of Mona in the Promised Land is that it is populated by a great many likable people whose stories become of considerable, if not compelling, interest. But the manner in which those stories are told is uninviting; the narrative is in the present tense—one of the riskiest of all fictive devices—and the prose seeks to emulate, albeit not literally, the jangly chatter of teenagers. Perhaps this will appeal to readers younger than I, but more likely they too sooner or later will tire of the ceaseless talk, too much of it uninteresting and too much of it leading nowhere.

The eponymous Mona Chang is a teenager who in 1968 moves with her parents and sister into a comfortable New York suburb called Scarshill, “a liberal place” with a substantial Jewish population into which these Chinese immigrant parents and their highly Americanized children expect to be—and are—welcomed. The parents run a popular pancake house with half an eye on the cash register and the other half looking back across the Pacific to China:

Make sure, more sure—the endless refrain of her parents' lives. Sometimes Mona wants to say to them. You know, the Chinese revolution was a long time ago; you can get over it now. Okay, you had to hide in the garden and listen to bombs fall out of the sky, also you lost everything you had. And it's true you don't even know what happened to your sisters and brothers and parents, and only wish you could send them some money. But didn't you make it? Aren't you here in America, watching the sale ads, collecting your rain checks. You know what you are now? she wants to say. Now you're smart shoppers. You can forget about make sure. But in another way she understands it's like asking the Jews to get over the Holocaust, or like asking the blacks to get over slavery. Once you've lost your house and your family and your country, your devil-may-care is pretty much gone too.

What we have here is a quintessentially American theme, the dislocation and discontent that linger in the hearts of those who have fled oppression elsewhere and now find themselves uneasy pilgrims in the promised land. In the case of the Chang family this is more true of the parents than of the daughters, but for Mona and Callie the tensions between China and America are no less real, if more subtle and elusive.

Mona gets a sense of this when she visits an exhibition of Chinese portraiture in which what seems to matter is “not these people's inner selves, but their place in society.” Thinking about this, Mona understands—or so at least she thinks—“what mattered most to the people in the pictures as if it still mattered most to her: not that the world would know them for themselves—they would never dream of such a thing—but only that they might know they belonged, and where.”

The search for such knowledge is what Mona conducts in these pages, as have countless others in countless books before this one. It is an ancient and honorable American theme that has lost none of its pertinence, in large measure because as one group of immigrants finds where it belongs, another comes along to ask the same questions. It is no accident that Mona, in the course of her search, converts to Judaism; this has much to do with joining the society of her closest friends in Scarshill, but it also is a way of identifying her own search with theirs.

This is interesting and serious business, and clearly Gish Jen has thought about it with some care; the best parts of this novel are those in which the teenagers' chatter fades away and a more mature narrative voice emerges. But the abrupt contrast between these two voices is jarring, leaving one to wonder which is the novel's true expression. My own hunch is that the chatter is something Jen needed to get out of her system and that the adult voice is the real her; this certainly is what Typical American indicated, and there seems little reason not to hope that it will be the dominant voice the next time around.