[In the following review, Conant disparages East Is East's plotting, characterization, and prose as superficial.]

A young sailor in the Japanese Merchant Marine, Hiro Tanaka, jumps ship off the coast of Georgia, swims ashore and tries to survive on his own as an illegal alien. Such is the unlikely premise of T. Coraghessan Boyle's farcical, often crude and, on occasion, mordantly funny new novel [East Is East]. Despite its heavy does of unreality, the account of Hiro's brief, disastrous sojourn in the New World is at times strangely compelling.

The author of many short stories and three previous novels, most recently the highly regarded World's End, Boyle is fond of the narrative of strenuous physical adventure. Although his latest work casts a somewhat wider satirical net, at base it simply continues to mine that imaginative vein. East Is East details Hiro's trials from his initial escape, vividly described in the novel's opening—"He was swimming, rotating from front to back, thrashing his arms and legs and puffing out his cheeks, and it seemed as if he'd been swimming forever. He did the crawl, the breast-stroke, the Yokohama kick …"—to his last desperate bid for freedom, toward the end of the book, in the Okefenokee swamp. "Was it all a swamp, the whole hopeless country?" Hiro exclaims miserably as he finds himself slogging through its vast expanse, "Where were the shopping malls, the condos, the tattoo parlors and supermarkets?"

Hiro, whose name is a sort of literary joke (hero), functions chiefly as a device; as a character he has almost no reality. In only one respect does the invention betray some actuality: The author carefully supplies his protagonist with a body that suffers horribly, and (in Boyle's hands) comically, from the indignities of life on the run in the utter wilderness we forget our country still contains.

As a literary convenience, Hiro serves his creator well. He allows Boyle an odd vantage point from which to make fun of Southerners, caricature American attitudes toward Japanese and vice versa, and above all spoof the Immigration and Naturalization Service INS—an agency whose officials in recent years have certainly made every effort to behave as if their sole mission was to provide material for comic novelists. But "Hiro Tanaka" is so far from being a developed persona that for the most part he strikes us as a piece of research, a tissue of guidebook phrases and ethnographic shorthand about contemporary Japanese mannerisms and mores.

As it happens Hiro is only half-Japanese. He is the unfortunate by-blow of an American father, a hippie on a visit to Japan during the '60s, who abandoned him soon after he was born, and a Tokyo bargirl, who in her shame committed suicide when he was six. Abused all his life for his mixed parentage, he develops an idealized view of America, nourished by pop music, movies and TV. He expects to find in the United States a kind of paradise of miscegenation, a land of "glorious, polyglot cities" where "you could be one part Negro, two parts Serbo-Croatian and three parts Eskimo and walk down the street with your head held high." What he discovers instead is that nearly everyone he encounters is as xenophobic and racially intolerant as any of the taunters he left behind, and that, at least in the noisome bogs where he makes his landing, there is hardly a street to be seen.

The grotesque disparity between Hiro's expectations and the unpleasant realities that confront him in the swampy back country of the American South is the source of much of the comedy in East Is East. It is not humor that appeals to the reader's kindlier feelings, however; it is closer to the cruel amusement aroused in a native by the discomfiture of a hapless foreigner.

Hiro is more than discomfited, of course—he is literally dragged through the mud. That the result should be as killingly funny as it sometimes is testifies to Boyle's professional skill, but it leaves one uneasy about his intentions. The book is filled with the emotions and vocabulary of ethnic antagonism—words like gaijin (apparently Japanese slang for non-Japanese), and the more familiar American epithets for Tanaka's countrymen are thick on the page. The thought that a segment of the novel-reading public is eager to be given permission to laugh at a series of torments undergone by an impoverished illegal immigrant is a bit disturbing; the idea that an established writer might wish to capitalize on the opportunity more disturbing still.

I should say that, on the evidence of this book, it is entirely unclear whether Boyle has a thought in his head concerning his themes and purposes. Nor can one determine how much he really aspires to satire, an honorific reviewers regularly bestow on his writing. If anything, there are stylistic tendencies that betray an ambition to write a more thoughtless kind of popular fiction: lots of one sentence paragraphs, one word sentences, and a tedious, sudsy subplot involving the loves and careerist maneuverings of a struggling female writer from California who harbors Hiro at a preposterous artists' colony.

Ruth Dershowitz is a monster of selfishness; she uses Hiro repeatedly, beds him when her boyfriend pays undue attention to a rival, and attempts to exploit him, first for fictional material and then as a springboard to a career in journalism. Her fellow residents, supposedly famous avant-garde literary celebrities, are all pretentious fools, and the treatment of their goings-on is labored and gratuitous.

At its best, East is East is an exuberant combination of proficient adventure writing and burlesque. It is a tall tale—or, more accurately, a spoof of a tall tale. Boyle has great fun parodying Hemingway, Faulkner and even Melville (along the way there's some malarkey about an albino INS man and a hunt for a rare type of white pygmy sunfish).

Significantly, the author appears to have the most fun of all writing about the savage, predatory, nonhuman life of the swamps: He concocts horrific descriptions of the Okefenokee: "Vast and primeval, unfathomable, unconquerable, bastion of cottonmouth, rattlesnake and leech, mother of vegetation, father of mosquito, soul of silt, the Okefenokee …" etc. And he remarks on the hideous cries of the birds swooping across "the cremated sky": "Somewhere a bird began to cry out, hard and urgent, as if some unseen hand were plucking it alive."

The minor characters in this novel have names like Detlef Abecorn, Irving Thalamus, Septima Light, Mignonette Teitelbaum, and Orlando Seezers. From this one is encouraged to conclude nothing more than the fact that a Dickensian flair for creating names does not guarantee Dickens' substance, satirical intelligence or appeal to readers' sympathies.

Boyle commands a quirky, ferociously energetic prose that seems to owe nothing to anyone writing today, with the possible exception of Tom Wolfe. He should do more with his considerable gifts than squander them on cynical conceits like East is East.