A review by grahamiam
A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee

4.0

It took me forever longer than it should have to read this book because it's so overflowing with trauma that it was really difficult to want to read it. This book is overwhelmingly intense. The writing, though, is not as strong as Native Speaker or On Such a Full Sea. The present of the novel, especially the dialogue, is very weak overall, and because the first half of the book is focused on that storyline I would've given this three stars if not for the last hundred pages. The last hundred pages are on another level when it comes to the writing, but the trauma keeps amping up and up to the point where the last few turns had less of an impact than they should due to numbing.

It was very clear what the author was trying to do with the weaving of this novel, though, and it was a very ambitious project.