142 World Literature Today reviews by her unstable mother. By October 2002 this girl has become, improbably , a college president named M. R. Neukirchen. Oates develops where the girl came from, how she was adopted by Quaker stepparents, how she was driven to achieve and, in alternating chapters, charts the rigorous schedule and how the best-forgotten years operate to destabilize a successful scholar and administrator. Although always “M. R.” to colleagues and donors, the “Mudgirl” is always in her, evoked in the chapter headings that call her “Mudwoman.” The allegorical aura of such naming is reinforced by the rest of the chapter titles: “Mudgirl Has a New Name,” “Mudwoman Mated.” There are parallels between the present and the past, thankfully not too insistent. For instance, the young girl has a fear of the brown river coursing beneath the bridge in Carthage, New York, while the president wills herself to swim laps in the college pool. One intrusion of the past is in the form of a nightmare about being forced from the pool to be assaulted beside a dirty river. This is not to say that the novel becomes a forest of symbols; it owes more to the fairy tales that “Merry” heard from her Quaker stepparents. Naïvely, they did not understand that happy endings don’t erase the terrifying middles for a child with Mudgirl’s background. As in a fairy tale, M. R. often acts and encounters situations that seem as inevitable as they are unintended. Through the felt vividness of such moments, Oates opens readers to the ways people collide with the world, one another, and themselves . In this novel, Joyce Carol Oates continues to enlarge our range of perception , both of the people we might consider “them” and of ourselves. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Petar Sarić. Mitrova Amerika. Belgrade. Prosveta. 2012. isbn 9788607019663 Mitrova Amerika (Mitar’s America) is the Serbian literary contribution to the topic of immigration to the United States. In this intriguing novel, Petar Sarić (b. 1937), a native of Kosovo and author of several novels, books of poetry, and plays, takes a look at Serbian immigration before World War I. The protagonist, Mitar, a Montenegrin, arrives at Galveston, Texas, sponsored by another Serb who immigrated before him and eventually became a proverbially rich man in America. Mitar experiences the hard work of unloading ships in the Galveston harbor while assimilating to the new way of life and learning, among other things, the new language. Sarić does not dwell on the physical aspects of those experiences but rather on the psychological and emotional difficulties Mitar is exposed to while trying, or sometimes not trying hard enough, to accept the new way of life. His main dilemma is whether to accept the new life while forgetting the old one. Unfortunately , the old country is still alive in him. Thus, when World War I erupts, he and many of his former countrymen return to Serbia and enroll in the Serbian army as volunteers. Mitar leaves his wife and two children behind in Galveston, while a third child goes to Serbia with him. Although this does not solve all his problems, he has at least tried to solve them. The plot is enriched by the love story between Mitar and his wife, Ljubica , also an immigrant from Montenegro . She adjusts to the new life faster than her husband, which makes his joining the Serbian army more plausible , although he is not sure whether it is the real reason. Throughout the novel he is beset by strange contradictions in his nature. The story, told to him by his Galveston neighbor from India, of a man threatening to commit suicide in order to gain love and attention from his family but eventually hanging himself furthers Mitar’s woes. After he returns to his native village, he finds it changed completely, estranging him even from his native country, which leads to his attempting suicide. Yet he refuses to return to America and rejoin Ljubica and his two children. At the end of the novel, however, she joins him back in Montenegro, while their two children remained in America. Mitar ruefully complains that America “destroyed” his...