SOURCE: "America, from Right to Left," in Time, Vol. 147, No. 6, February 5, 1996, p. 72.

[In the following positive review, Iyer praises Audrey Hepburn's Neck as an unstereotypical and intimate portrayal of Japan.]

The first all but unfailing rule of foreign books about Japan is that they exult in the perspective of a bewildered outsider, not quite sure whether to be excited or exasperated by the science-fictive surfaces of that alien world. The second is that they find a focus for their mingled fascination and frustration in an unfathomable Japanese love object. The gracious and redeeming delight of Audrey Hepburn's Neck, a first novel by Alan Brown, an American, is that it turns all the standard tropes—and expectations—on their head by presenting Japan from the inside out, and yet with a sympathetic freshness that most longtime expatriates have long ago abandoned.

Daringly, Brown, a Fulbright scholar who lived in...