TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 7/04/97: Notorious: A Life of Ingrid Bergman By Donald Spoto Nonfiction plus 7/04/97: The Sense of Reality By Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy Nonfiction 7/03/97: A Journey With Elsa Cloud By Leila Hadley Nonfiction 7/02/97: News Of A Kidnapping By Gabriel García Márquez Nonfiction 7/01/97: Lolita By Vladmir Nabokov, performed by Jeremy Irons Fiction 6/30/97: Tearing The Silence: On Being German In America By Ursula Hegi Nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: Hi. We're Ingrid and Isabella and we have a cleaning problem. By day they were Swedish actresses. By night they sought the high that only cleaning can bring. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

monkeybridge __--- BY LAN CAO | VIKING | 260 PAGES | FICTION _______BY ELIZABETH JUDD in the past dozen years, fiction has certainly taught us that for Asian-Americans, being a daughter is no tea party. As if to hammer home the point, Lan Cao's "Monkey Bridge" -- which is being touted as the first novel by a Vietnamese-American about the immigrant experience -- depicts generational angst worthy of an Amy Tan novel. Mai Nguyen, Cao's buttoned-up, adolescent narrator, shares the same preoccupations of the four daughters in "The Joy Luck Club": making sense of a maddeningly enigmatic and strong-willed mother who's guarding an unsavory old-world secret. Fleeing Vietnam in 1975, just before U.S. troops evacuate Saigon, Mai and her mother arrive in Falls Church, Va., and must come to grips with each other and a community coping with the aftermath of war (the "American War," as the Vietnamese call it). Navigating suburbia is no problem for Mai; she interprets the adventures of "The Bionic Woman" for her mother, learns English without a trace of an accent and uses psychology -- "the new American religion" -- to make her mother's seemingly outlandish demands appear kosher to American onlookers. Mai becomes her mother's mother in an alien culture: "We were going through life in reverse, and I was the one who would help my mother through the hard scrutiny of ordinary suburban life." Comparisons to Tan don't reflect badly on "Monkey Bridge," especially since Cao has a distinctive style that's subtle and engaging. But because the novel is so clearly autobiographical, I wished that Cao had abandoned her creaky literary devices and written a memoir. In the interests of creating a compelling narrative, Cao shamelessly leads the reader toward the soap-operatic revelation of Mai's mother's murky parentage. The sensationalism feels tacked on, while the well-chosen details are what gives the story its energy. Cao excels at memorializing, conveying ironies in the simplest details. For instance, the Mekong Grocery, where Mai's mother works, becomes a meeting place for the American GIs of Falls Church who want to indulge their taste for Vietnamese delicacies and distaste for Jane Fonda. Cao also tells us that in Saigon women buy paper bags of canaries and hummingbirds and free them for the karma of doing a kind deed. And we learn that in Vietnamese, the word for "please" is "make good karma." ("Make good karma and pass the butter.") In "Monkey Bridge," it's the glimpses of Vietnamese-American culture -- not the melodrama -- that left me wanting more. July 8, 1997 Elizabeth Judd lives in Washington, D.C. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html