Max, Mischa and the Tet Offensive is a sprawling novel about art, homesickness and trying to create a place to call home; about the applicability of Vietnamese guerilla warfare in everyday life, about those who have been to war and those who protested against it; about generic library music, hyperrealist paintings of washing machines and girls who look like Shelley Duvall, complicated productions of open-ended plays and films; about growing up with communist parents or growing at all; about the sun’s glare out on Fire Island and a sought-after workprint copy of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. But more than anything this is a novel about the big question anyone who has ever left home sooner or later has to ask himself: How long can you be gone before it is too late to go home?