A review by mustardseed
Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee

emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Native Speaker: A Soliloquy of Self as Symbol & Stranger 

The story follows Henry Park, a second generation Korean-American spy. The bulk of the novel is focused on his own personal life (struggles with the family he created with his wife, the influence of his father) and his job as a spy on a prominent Korean politician in America, John Kwang. 

Much like John Kwang is “representative, easily drawn and iconic, the idea being if you know him you can know a whole people”, Henry too is a symbol, his reminisciences on his own condition as an “alien” (as his white wife says) in America the story of an entire diaspora even as it is his own. Political tensions are picked apart, “yellow against black”, “white against black”, “white and yellow” through his eyes, and we get the sense of a forever observer, standing at the uncertain precipice between viewing from a distance and being intimately involved. The novel weaves in such parallels, like his mishap in a mission with a Filippino psychiatrist where he observes and yet weaves his responses with bits of his true self, losing sight of his job—we see a sort of unravelling of Henry, his emotional and psychological simultaneous distance and nearness. 

In many senses too, this novel is beyond an exploration of the diasporic condition, this sense of alienation and “strangeness”—it is also a moving portrait of a man. Beyond his ethnic identity, there is a real sense and build of a person, with touching meditations on grief, love, pain—a human experience. It is written with prose neither simplistic nor elaborate, but a lucidity and precision of expression. 

Native Speaker is a deeply emotive and simultaneously socio-politically astute novel. It reminds me of something I once heard, that it is by telling the most personal stories that you can relate the most globally. 

The novel begins with Henry's wife leaving him, and the list she leaves behind describing who he is. These labels echo throughout the novel, whether explicitly or not, as he negotiates with his idea of selfhood. I get the sense that, written in first person, Native Speaker is his letter of response, both to the world, and to himself.