SOURCE: “Into the Faded Air, the Torpid,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4,431, March 4-10, 1988, p. 245.

In the following review, Reading discusses the texts and subtexts of A Cannibal in Manhattan.

To the South Pacific island of New Burnt Norton, home of the sometime cannibalistic, almost extinct Lesser Pimbas, comes nubile New York billion-heiress Maria Fishburn—ostensibly to teach algebra to the hapless natives under the auspices of the Peace Corps, but really because she fancies the tribe's president-elect, five-foot purple-skinned Mgungu Yabba Mgungu, having seen his picture on the front of the National Geographic years earlier and fallen in love with him. Maria dispatches her prize back to the States. The ensuing culture-shock, recorded in Mgungu's idiosyncratic first-person English, is the subject of Tama Janowitz's amusing picaresque fiction [A Cannibal in Manhattan.]

The noble savage serves, of course, to accentuate the real absurdity, viciousness and debasement of the...