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A review by cameronbradley
Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee
3.0
Native Speaker is a lot of things: a spy thriller, a portrayal of the immigrant experience, a marriage drama, and a personal tragedy tale. If you're wondering whether all those elements merge and crackle into a fusion bomb of excitement and awe...they, disappointingly, do not.
Not that this is a bad book per se. In fact, it's an extroardinarly ambitious first novel by Chang-rae Lee, which was published when he was only 29. The prose is mostly excellent, and I devoured the first fifty or so pages in a single sitting.
In a nutshell, Henry Park, the novel's first-generation Korean-American protagonist, is left with nothing but a note after his wife leaves him. In meandering patches, we catch glimpses of his rough upbringing in a traditional household, his ingratiation into the political campaign of an upstart Korean politician named John Kwang, his foray into the world of industrial spywork, the tragic fate of his child, his....yeah...there's a lot going on; and the lens through which the reader watches the story unfold is shaky and unfocused.
The plot suffers as a result, and although my copy of the book is only roughly 350 pages, it took me nearly three months to get around to finishing it. (To put that in perspective, I typically read about fifty books a year [a book a week]).
Yet as I finished the last page, I got chills thinking about how powerful this book could've been: Henry Park, torn between two worlds, forever feeling himself to be an outcast, is pressured to betray a rising politician who stands for everything he should be aligned with, yet his numbness to his Korean heritage and his somnabulant devotion to a country that seems to view him as an outcast bends him into a shape unrecognizable to everyone, including—it seems—himself.
If only the journey was as satisfying as the destination.
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Not that this is a bad book per se. In fact, it's an extroardinarly ambitious first novel by Chang-rae Lee, which was published when he was only 29. The prose is mostly excellent, and I devoured the first fifty or so pages in a single sitting.
In a nutshell, Henry Park, the novel's first-generation Korean-American protagonist, is left with nothing but a note after his wife leaves him. In meandering patches, we catch glimpses of his rough upbringing in a traditional household, his ingratiation into the political campaign of an upstart Korean politician named John Kwang, his foray into the world of industrial spywork, the tragic fate of his child, his....yeah...there's a lot going on; and the lens through which the reader watches the story unfold is shaky and unfocused.
The plot suffers as a result, and although my copy of the book is only roughly 350 pages, it took me nearly three months to get around to finishing it. (To put that in perspective, I typically read about fifty books a year [a book a week]).
Yet as I finished the last page, I got chills thinking about how powerful this book could've been: Henry Park, torn between two worlds, forever feeling himself to be an outcast, is pressured to betray a rising politician who stands for everything he should be aligned with, yet his numbness to his Korean heritage and his somnabulant devotion to a country that seems to view him as an outcast bends him into a shape unrecognizable to everyone, including—it seems—himself.
If only the journey was as satisfying as the destination.
------------------------------------------------
[Subscribe to my free newsletter Lit Smithery and receive curated links to poems, books, and literary knicknacks directly into your inbox.]