Day 6: Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee
Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker is one of those wonderful hybrid novels. It's a detective story, a love story and an exploration of what it means to be Korean-American. The Guardian reviewed it with these words:
Now, I've never read anything by Saul Bellow so I can't comment upon the comparison, but the review does hit the nail on the head with regards to how the novel works. Nothing really happens. Not on a major scale, anyway, until the last few pages, and even then it's understated and only important and shattering where the past events of the novel are considered. But that is part of the point. Henry Park, our protagonist, works hard at being unnoticeable. Both because he is visibly 'un-American' and knows what that means, and also because his job demands it. His wife is WASPness personified, but her job is teaching people to speak English. And her students are mostly immigrants, who want to learn how to sound American, to become American.
I can't really go into any more detail about how this all plays out because I'll ruin the larger narrative of the novel, but all the personal political problems and quarrels that Henry is part of become exemplified and exaggerated by a larger political narrative that he then has to play a part in.
This novel is a quiet one. Nothing, as I've said above, really happens, but at the same time everything happens. It's concerned with sound and noise and visibility and being part of something. And it succeeds because it is a very hard novel to stop thinking about. This novel stuck in my head for days and days and days. I spent them rolling the events around and trying to make sense of them for myself. I hope it does the same for you.
"As in a Saul Bellow, only about three things happen (or a thousand, depending on how you look at it). And, like a Bellow novels, it is also very, very good."
Now, I've never read anything by Saul Bellow so I can't comment upon the comparison, but the review does hit the nail on the head with regards to how the novel works. Nothing really happens. Not on a major scale, anyway, until the last few pages, and even then it's understated and only important and shattering where the past events of the novel are considered. But that is part of the point. Henry Park, our protagonist, works hard at being unnoticeable. Both because he is visibly 'un-American' and knows what that means, and also because his job demands it. His wife is WASPness personified, but her job is teaching people to speak English. And her students are mostly immigrants, who want to learn how to sound American, to become American.
I can't really go into any more detail about how this all plays out because I'll ruin the larger narrative of the novel, but all the personal political problems and quarrels that Henry is part of become exemplified and exaggerated by a larger political narrative that he then has to play a part in.
This novel is a quiet one. Nothing, as I've said above, really happens, but at the same time everything happens. It's concerned with sound and noise and visibility and being part of something. And it succeeds because it is a very hard novel to stop thinking about. This novel stuck in my head for days and days and days. I spent them rolling the events around and trying to make sense of them for myself. I hope it does the same for you.