Maria Lauret's study of “verba peregrina” (2), or “barbarolexis” (4), in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature is a work of impressive scholarly erudition as well as a declaration of her commitment to a multilingual American-authored canon of world literature. In Lauret's view, the future of American writing is marked by transnational hybridity. “In the beginning [of this literary-cultural transformation] is the wanderword” (251), she argues, or “language migration” (1), defined as the proliferation of “words and phrases in other languages that disrupt, enchant, occlude or highlight the taken-for-granted English of American literature and can thereby perform wonders of poetic signification as well as cultural critique” (2). Wanderwords are “other-language fragments” (3) introduced to snag and subvert, and thus problematize, any conventionally standardized flow of reception and appropriation. Wanderwords are guests in the host language which, whilst seemingly compliant as regards grammar and syntax, resist translation or any other mode of neat and easy assimilation. Instead, they flaunt the intactness of their difference. Inserted to safeguard against self-expressive inauthenticity even if it courts opacity, wanderwords assert themselves as intransigent partners in the business of literary meaning making – on a par with rather than in any way subordinate to the host lexis. “Like migrants, they carry cultural baggage and represent otherness in American English textual environments” (1), Lauret asserts, yet perhaps unlike many migrants, they refuse to aid what counts as acceptable self-expression within the parlance of the host.

The corpus of Lauret's investigation is wide-ranging and inclusive, encompassing works by writers as diverse as Mary Antin and Eva Hoffman, Edward Bok, Dirk Nieland and Truus van Bruinessen, Richard Rodriguez, Bharati Mukherjee and Theresa Hak Kyung. Designed to take the reader “from basic definitions of bi- and multilingualism … towards a poetics of bi- and multilingual literature” (10), the study's chapter-by-chapter trajectory transports us “from loss to rapture, from the zero-sum game of language acquisition … to the radically insurgent bi- or multilingual play that fuels the poetic sensibilities of the writers and poets discussed in the final two chapters and in the Conclusion” (35). Guiding us “through a century of American migrant writing and a plethora of histories and theories from various disciplinary perspectives” (235), and eventually leading us into “the wilds of bilingual American literature” (244) dominated by contemporary multilingual virtuosos Junot Díaz and Susana Chávez-Silverman, Lauret's analysis examines in turn life-writing, both published and unpublished, and essays, novels and poetry. Her inclusion of the autobiographical work of Dutch Canadian housewife Truus van Bruinessen testifies to her disregard for national demarcations in literary and critical practice, while her alertness to differences in attitude and approach shows in her comparison of the works of Mukherjee and Rodriguez. Mukherjee represents “the migrant who is secure in her bicultural identity and her several languages, no longer perched on a hyphen, like Rodriguez, but happy to have a foot in each camp and a transnational community in between” (151).

There are a number of interesting counterintuitive turns in Wanderwords where Lauret's erudition sparks into innovative critique. Thus, among world literatures, Lauret chooses not to cast American writing in the role of hegemonic trailblazer but instead perceives it as isolated and lagging behind, “belatedly reconnecting with the world” (31), reliant on its migrant writers to bring it out of its provincial comfort zone and “create an American literature that makes transnational, global connections” (8). Lauret is equally insightful on the monolingual ironies of multiculturalism that afflict both creative writing and literary criticism in the US. “What does it mean for American multiculturalism,” Lauret asks, “that many of its main proponents, in literature and the academy alike, assume it has to be voiced monolingually” (11)? In the same vein, rather than championing translation as literature's key to multicultural globality, Lauret cautions against translation's tendency to portray multilingualism as an impediment to global understanding. According to Lauret, “translation on its own, without awareness of what we might be missing, can … inhibit cross-cultural understanding precisely because it diminishes difference and mis-educates the monolingual reader into a false sense of multicultural security and democracy” (63). “Translation is never enough,” she asserts, “and reliance on translation into English in particular allows the would-be multicultural, monolingual reader to stay in the comfort zone of English as a global language” (17). Citing the work of Doris Summer, Lauret in fact comes very close to celebrating the reader's experience of cultural alienation and unintelligibility on confrontation with multilingual writing. Lauret understands that the proliferation of wanderwords in literature extends “an invitation to readers and writers to confront the ‘multilingual sublime’ of an aesthetics that challenges and provokes, that works through … ‘communication with a cut and a tear’ and stretches political as well as aesthetic sensibilities” (60). Consequently, rather than crying out for translation, which in effect annihilates its impact, multilingual literary practice aims to capture the futility of wanting to represent and understand the entire world by dint of just one linguistic code. Again borrowing from another critic (in this case Mary Louise Pratt), Lauret takes the view that “the image for multilingualism is not translation … but desdoblamiento (‘doubling’), a multiplying of the self” (235). Literary multilingualism, then, reminds us of our ongoing inability to grasp the reality of the world in its full multicultural complexity and multifacetedness.

Despite covering a huge amount of material, Lauret's study ultimately falls short of fulfilling its ambition to develop into a poetics of multilingual literary practice. This is mainly due to Lauret's reluctance to run with her own ideas and insights; throughout, she tends to ventriloquize the critical views of others instead of prioritizing her own. Wanderwords represents a solid scholarly history of the function of “other-language fragments” (3) in twentieth- and twenty-first-century multilingual American writing; this must count as its main achievement. Theoretically speaking, however, the study remains surprisingly reticent. This is by no means to dispute or belittle the value or usefulness of Lauret's work, which shows especially when it is read alongside other critical studies on contemporary American writing published around the same time – such as Caren Irr's Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Anjali Pandey's Monolingualism and Linguistic Exhibitionism in Fiction (2015) and Rebecca Walkowitz's Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015) – all of which attempt to define American literature's currency within the expanding field of contemporary world literatures.