''Mona In The Promised Land''

----------------------------------------------------------------- "Mona in the Promised Land" by Gish Jen Knopf, $24 -----------------------------------------------------------------

Gish Jen is a master of irony in ethnic situations, and her new novel, "Mona in the Promised Land," demonstrates her one-two-punch-line style of writing.

The premise sounds like a bad TV sitcom: Chinese girl brought up in East Coast suburbs decides to be Jewish; has teen crush on Japanese boy who uses judo on her in farewell gesture; comes of age in '60s, when everyone tries out new identities.

The ethnic satire is an ever-widening spiral: Mona's immigrant parents run a pancake house, not a Chinese restaurant; Seth, her Jewish sort-of boyfriend, pitches a teepee on his parents' lawn to protest bourgeois values (while continuing to mooch off Mom and Dad).

What keeps the novel funny, rather than stereotypical, and vibrant, rather than simplistic, is Jen's tone. The wry language lends Mona's humor an insider quality that protects the novel from becoming one long, bad, ethnic joke, while Jen's awareness of her characters' human foibles protects it from becoming an exoticized soap opera.