[In the following review of East Is East, Hymes asserts that Boyle's characterization and plotting serve short stories better than novels but notes that his wit prevents the book from becoming tiresome.]

T. Coraghessan Boyle is a writer who's hot, relatively new in town, and very good. He has a glib wit and a superb attention to detail. He is his best, though, when his talents are geared toward his short stories. His novels can have the feel of elongation and a certain weightlessness, as though they have been stretched a little too thin and then fattened with hot air, like French pastry or rhetoric. His fourth novel, East Is East, has that feel.

The story concerns Hiro Tanaka, a Japanese seaman who has had to jump ship off the coast of Georgia and swim for it. He winds up on a small island, on which there is a writer's colony of some apparent repute. Hiro's father was an American hippie who deserted the family, so Hiro can easily be said to be running from a nightmare toward a dream.

He lands right in the middle of hell, a hell that is circus-like and mostly populated by freakish characters who are hardly recognizable as human by either Hiro or the reader. They include Ruth, a young writer at the colony who is plagued by uncertainty about a talent she apparently does not posses; Saxby, who makes love to Ruth and searches for a new species of fish (and whose part would be considered thankless if this were a movie); and a whole slew of other caricatures who are meant to resemble real people but don't.

Only Hiro achieves depth and pathos, and those in only the last few pages. On the very last page he obtains even a sort of martyrdom, while every American encountered is remembered as petty and self-centered. The point is obviously to elaborate on an insidious spiritual bankruptcy of which even our artists are ignorant, but it would be more powerfully made with characters who are not so vacuous.

Otherwise, East is East is very well written and, though too long, not boring. Boyle employs a neat technique in overlapping characters' accounts of events, thus achieving a Rashomon effect in seeing the same thing different ways. It works at first and then becomes a little tiresome, though, provoking the thought that maybe he just didn't have much for these people to do. In short, Boyle should stay short, even in novel form.