THE LAUGHING SUTRA by Mark Salzman...

THE LAUGHING SUTRA by Mark Salzman (Vintage: $10). Mark Salzman’s engaging first novel plays off the Chinese classic “Journey to the West”: Hsun-ching, an orphan reared by an elderly Buddhist scholar, travels to America in search of the last extant copy of a mysterious sutra, believed to confer instantaneous enlightenment. Accompanying Hsun-ching is the mysterious martial artist, Colonel Sun, who turns out to be Sun Wu-k’ung, the redoubtable Monkey King whose mischief and military prowess shattered the tranquillity of the Jade Emperor of Heaven. In San Francisco, they confront opponents even stranger than the Fairy Maidens and Heavenly Kings of the original story, including a a burnt-out Vietnam draft-dodger, a New Age huckster and his Hollywood disciples, a pretentious conceptual artist and a champion dwarf-tosser. An American who has studied extensively in China, Salzman views both countries with sardonic detachment, describing the excesses of the Great Cultural Revolution and American consumerism with an irony that recalls De Maupassant and Cabell.