SOURCE: Review of Griever: An American Monkey King in China, in Western American Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, Summer, 1988, p. 160.

In the review below, Westrum remarks that Vizenor attempts to keep his readers off balance.

Reading Gerald Vizenor one begins to feel the fun of ambivalence. In Earthdivers, his finest book, Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart, and now Griever, Vizenor specializes in the difference between what appears to be and what is; he persists in pointing out that the world is not what we see, nor does it have to be left the way we find it. If authority is out for its own good—as it often is—authority should be tickled into laughing at itself.

If we are confused by his work, our mistake is that we bring our own cultural assumptions about the truth of the established order into Vizenor's world. But Vizenor will not limit...