GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION
Tiger's Tailby Gus Lee
Knopf, New York, 298pp, $24
REVIEW:
Sick and tired of sob-sister novels from Asian American women who want to believe Asian American men simply don't exist? Then you're ready for Gus Lee, maybe. Equal parts Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and any Mickey Spillane hard-boiled detective gritfest, Tiger's Tail is one two-fisted, hard-living, spit-and-sweat novel.
Get past Lee's me-big-American-GI-stud posturing--which in itself may be forgiveable in the context of American letters--wherein he uses South Coreans as the little-dink foil, and you might appreciate Gus Lee's story of a shell-shocked Asian American Vietnam vet going to Corea in search of redemption. It's an arena often visited. Lee injects it with new life with some impressive wordsmithing. He flashes Jackson Kan back to a jungle battle:
I clacked eight claymore underbrush mines set in overlapping arcs, and five thousand steel balls raked them as grenades crumped. We bared teeth, grunting as we squeezed short, savage burst of automatic fire, knocking down bodies, flaming the grass, the gunfire proclaiming its own government." Whew.
Gus Lee is the product of a Shanghai-born father and an American stepmother. He somehow turned an asphalt-scarred boyhood in an Oakland ghetto into West Point and UC Davis. His years in the service as a drill sergeant and command judge advocate provided the material for his earlier West-Point anthem Honor and Duty and his latest.
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