Native Speaker

Rating:
Summary: One of those mediocre, MFA ,ethnic novels
Review: This book is so dull, so formulaic, so redolent of a writing workshop, one has to ask himself whether a minority writer can ever write something relevant to all people instead of focusing on their little narrow immigrant lives. These kinds of immigration, assimilation, slice-of-life culture novels are the lynch pins of mediocre writers. Just look at Jhumpa Lahiri, another awful MFA writer who writes about her hum-drum Indian upbringing. And everybody fawns over these pieces, screaming that its great for multiculturalism. Yeah, great, wonderful, but that doesn't change the fact that these novels are woefully bland.

Rating:
Summary: Chang-Rae Lee, J'accuse
Review: When this book arrived in 1995, it was hailed as a crossover success. My Asian-Am friends all felt `vindicated' by Lee's emotionally rich characters, his finely pitched all-embracing Whitmanic prose style. I've read this book a couple of times and tried to figure out why it found such a ready and willing audience. I haven't found any close readings online, so here are some notes, my close reading, my overworked accusations.
This book can be divided into roughly two halves. The first centers around our narrator's, Henry Park's father. His father speaks in a mangled pidgeon, won't let his son ask him about his work, hires a `replacement' when the mother dies. He is incapable of showing himself as vulnerable; when he is robbed and pistol whipped at the grocery, he comes home and locks the door to his room, so that neither his wife nor son can see him or talk to him. Henry learns from his father to hide his emotions, which comes across in his relationship to Lelia, the WASPy Bostonian he has made his wife.
The second half closes in on Henry's relationship to John Kwang, a Korean Councilman from Queens who he is assigned to by the spy agency he works for (founded by another creepy father figure, the all-American Dennis Hoagland). Kwang is everything Henry's father is not, he embraces black folks and takes it upon himself to heal the tensions between African-Americans and Koreans in the city. He is "effortlessly Korean, effortlessly American," not the embarrasingly accented provisional citizen that Henry's father embodies. Henry infiltrates Kwang's political organization so thoroughly that Kwang tells him everything, and according to Henry "shows him his true face." Henry calls him his necessary invention, a clue that Henry is not really a spy but... an writer who wants to escape the ghetto of Asian-American lit.
The father's character, masterful as it is, is what one might expect from a writer of identity literature. The writer relishes most the painfully intimate detail, the dark family secret. Kwang is pure invention, or at least exercise in psychological redemption. Around the midway point of the book, Park goes into a self-reflective mini-story about his relationship with another of his subjects, a Filipino who he betrays, as he must betray all of those he is paid to spy on. He talks, unsurprisingly, a lot about his father in his sessions. At one point he reflects that Dr. Luzan employs an unusual therapeutic technique, one which depends not on fast association but on slow _narrative_. This brings us to Park's relationship with Hoagland, his boss. Hoagland demands that his spies transmit back flat character description, or "registers" that sum up the profile in as few words as possible, reduce the subjects to pure "identity." Park was originally the best of his group at this, a teacher's pet. But since his botched operation with Dr. Luzan, has been crafting narratives that Hoagland finds useless, too heavy on story, not enough cold character assessment.
Kwang is a great invention, a redemptive counter to Henry's dad. We see Kwang both as mediated by the reactive and faintly jingoistic tabloids and in his unguarded father-son conferences with Henry. His character slips in and out of the realm of folk tale; when Henry tries to restrain him, example, he finds that Kwang is inhumanely strong. At his lows, he exhibits a Fu Manchu-like sadism. Most important to Henry, he displays his weakness and humanity without reserve. In their last encounter, Henry is wildly brawling with the attackers of Kwang, whom the whole city has turned against.
In _Native Speaker_, Lee leapt from the prison-house of identity literature, but he seems to have crossed over into a vein of contemporary high literary fiction which is hugely influenced by notions of clinical THERAPY. In this book, Park and his wife, Lelia (herself a professional speech therapist), spend most of their efforts on healing the wound of their LOSS, the loss of their perfect and only son, MITT. These are the kind of people that reenact the accidental asphyxiation in bed and at the same time are painfully aware that they are conducting a therapeutic exercise, one which will help them MOVE ON from their loss. Lee's break from the ghetto of Asian-Am Lit. is admirable, his embrace of therapy as form and subject is ... a loss.