"I Have No Physical Organ For Guilt. But I Have A Question. I Want To Know - I Do Feel Clearly That I Have a Soul. There Is Such Thing As A Soul. I Feel It. I Started To Send It Out Of My Body, But Got Scared And Pulled It Back. I May Have Thrown My Soul Out Of Kilter. How Do You Reconcile Unity And Identity?"

I finished reading Tripmaster Monkey about 2 weeks ago and I'm just stumped on exactly what to say about it. In some ways, the writing was just brilliant - a skill set that I would very much like to develop, including rapid fire prose that doesn't feel forced or hokey, but feels natural, smart, and completely defines the mental state of a character. But in other ways, I just wanted to gloss over some very long sections of the book because they were just so drawn out and tedious to get through. I am certain that these long sections were important and were metaphors for many things the main character was dealing with, but they were just very dense and long, and it was easy for me to lose interest along the way. 

The book is about Wittman Ah Sing, a hippie Chinese-American who is a recent graduate of Berkeley in the 1960s. Wittman is trying to sort out his future path, primarily wanting to be a poet and playwright but having to settle for working in a department store. Wittman pines for a girl he knows from school, does lots of drugs, and marries a white girl he meets at a party. Wittman struggles with conventional expectations, capitalism, war, and very predominantly, self-identity as both an American and being of Chinese descent. 

Wittman's immediate goal is to stage the most elaborate play every conceived - his descriptions of his plans for play as well as the recounting of the actual staging of the play is often where I would get bogged down. Certainly the vision and eventual enacting of the play was impossibly surreal and could never actually be done in real life, and it was sometimes nice to just give in to the fantasy of possibilities beyond what could ever be contained within a stage setting. However, these descriptions would go on for dozens of pages and meander and change characters and storyline along the way. It was just hard for me to focus and feel much of a connection to what was going on. 

The writing was so funny at times and again, whip-smart. A large focus of the book is about how Wittman assesses what it means to be a Chinese-American in the mid 1960s and his conflict in identity around this (being so much of an American yet feeling continually insulted and exploited by white Americans). And while much of his analysis around this is done in a humorous tone, I really couldn't help feeling that it slid over the line into pretty racist territory. Wittman often mocked his own ancestry (everything from the way of speaking to clichés of Chinese restaurants) to make a point about how he felt Chinese-Americans were viewed and treated, but because it was done SO much throughout the book, it started to feel less like satire and more like the author herself was insulting her own culture. I realize it was meant to be a commentary about racism against Chinese-Americans, but it just didn't feel like it after awhile. 

So yeah, I definitely struggled with this one and I'm glad to be done with it. Onward we go. 

Next up is Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. I don't often do 2 books in a row from the same book list (both are from my list of female works of fiction), but in comparison to the other lists, I'm a bit farther behind on that list so I'll try to work on that one to even the score. 223 to go.