Far Out, Man

Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book from Maxine Hong Kingston Library of America.  Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor.  pp 479-864.  ****

This novel, published in 1989, is the quintessential Sixties novel (and seems to be the only novel that Maxine Hong Kingston has published, though she was a famous writer by the time it came out, having published two memoirs), and it reminds me what I miss from that fabulous and difficult decade.  There is no self-censorship in this book, quite the opposite; there’s something here to offend everyone, because the idea in those days was that we said what we wanted, wrote with complete freedom, and if somebody got hurt, tough shit.  They could hurt us back.  We admired people like Henry Miller and Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg; we cheered on Norman Mailer even when he made a total ass out of himself because we believed that in extremes we discovered a truth that we could find no other way.  Writers today are so timid, and who can blame them.  Every sentence bears the possibility of offending someone, and then you might be canceled.  You might disappear forever.

Go ahead and cancel Henry Miller; I’ve got his books and can still read them.

Tripmaster Monkey focuses on a young poet named Wittman Ah Sing (the allusion to another poet with a similar name is no accident), and to say the very least, it is picaresque; the story begins with our poet taking a walk somewhere in San Francisco, and there is every feeling that we have no idea where he—and we—are going to wind up.  He runs into a succession of street people.  He goes to his job in the children’s department of a department store, follows that with an all-night party where he takes up with various artistic types.  He gets married on a whim to a woman who wants to marry him but also wants him to know that, if she suddenly decides she loves someone else, she’s outta there (there’s something so Sixties about that.  She’s seeing how provisional marriage is but wants to do it anyway).  They have sex, and the reader gets to hang around.

The new couple goes to visit his parents, who live an incredibly colorful life, his mother playing Mah Jong with a number of her friends, all of them vaguely associated with show business; his father lives in a camp by a river and lives on almost nothing (when Wittman was a boy they lived the same way, on the food that the grocery store was going to throw out, the clothes that were imperfectly stitched, cars people didn’t want anymore).  They travel to Las Vegas in search of Wittman’s grandmother, whom the parents apparently abandoned when she took her life savings out of the bank and decided it was her right to gamble it away if she wanted.

In the meantime, Kingston is a verbal wizard who has so many allusions in her writing that the variorum edition will be all footnotes; Viet Thanh Nguyen tries to keep up but she leaves him in the dust.

Wittman is not only verbally funny; he is an almost Chaplinesque figure of physical comedy, though a hairy, unkempt version.  Going to work at that department store (a job he is soon to quit) he wears a Brooks Brothers blue suit that he bought for five bucks at Goodwill, but the only shirt he has to wear with it is green, and Chinese people are not supposed to wear green because it accentuates the yellowish color of their skin; he wears it anyway. While trying to hang a bike on a display hook, he mistakenly starts the front wheel turning and catches his hand under the fender, cutting it and leaving blood on his hand; he subsequently gets oil on his hand and gets his tie caught in the bike’s gears, so he actually has to cut the tie with scissors to extricate himself.  He tells a woman he meets on the bus that everyone is wearing ties short that year; it’s the latest style.  Wittman is, in short, a master of improvisation, even when things don’t go that well; later that day he’s at a reception where they’re serving wine and some food that is too good to resist (his diet being irregular and maybe not the best);  he’s already got a cigarette going, one of his roll-your-owns, so he just sits down on the floor, his back against the wall, to eat and drink and smoke.  He continues even when an elegant Chinese woman comes leans over and tells him to quit making a fool of himself.  He adapts to life as it is.

And the verbal humor.  The outlandish jokes.  The Chinese people talk unashamedly (and hilariously) like Chinese people and make fun of other groups constantly.  How does Kingston get away with this?  She doesn’t.  She published this book thirty years ago and could never publish it today.  Would the world be better off if this book vanished?  I don’t think so.

One major caveat.  Wittman is writing a huge play (at least in his head) that will supposedly include everyone he knows, and sometimes, in the presence of other people or just in the presence of his readers, he goes off on wild flights of fancy about it, imagining staging it with hundreds of people, all kinds of special effects.  Kingston loves that kind of writing; it shows up in her other books too.  I personally get tired of it.  I’ve skipped some long passages in this book.  Maybe it’s just me.

Kingston, who will turn 82 this year, is said to be writing a massive novel, something close to 2,000 pages at last count, that she doesn’t not want published until she is dead.  When I heard about that, I thought, how sad.  (I also thought, sorry, but this is how an old guy’s mind works: I wonder if I’ll live to see it.)  But maybe she’s not publishing the novel in her lifetime for this very reason, so she gets to say exactly what she wants, and doesn’t have to bow to the current timid publishing situation.  This is a woman who has won any number of honors, including the National Medal of Arts.  I wish she’d go ahead and publish the book.  I’d like to see what happens.

In the meantime I have the rest of this volume to read.  I should count myself lucky.