Behold the Immigrant Male, North American edition. He is a horror: a debauchee who pleads with a 16-year-old girl to let him 'see'; a sweaty, smelly, barbaric impostor among his pale-faced countrymen; a scar across their smooth sense of progress and reason, their 'state of permanent denial of the bad smells from sewers, infested slums, unheated apartments, single mothers on welfare, worn-out clothing'.

LRB 24 September 2009 | PDF Download