Smart, sexy, darkly funny, and enlightening stories from a master of the form.
Nine stories feature complicated Asian American characters living insightfully depicted lives in the worlds of moviemaking, restaurants, and bedrooms.
The complicated, frustrating, sometimes self-defeating experience of Asianness defined by Cathy Park Hong in Minor Feelings receives kaleidoscopic treatment in Lee's sixth work of fiction, returning to the concerns of his landmark debut collection, Yellow (2001). Like the frustrated film director in the first story here, "Late in the Day," Lee has, in his interim novels, given us narratives that include Asian characters but are not mostly about ethnicity. Now he dives back in, deconstructing the exponential complications of Asian identity. In the spellbinding title story, the lead character confounds people. "Was she Chinese? Japanese? (She was Korean.) Subsequent was her nationality. Was she a North Korean or South Korean citizen, then? Or an immigrant? Did she have a green card? (She was a naturalized US citizen.) Then there was the question of her name, Ingrid Kissler. Was this an Americanization of her Korean name, something she had made up? Or had she once been married? (She’d been adopted by a white couple from Chanhassen, Minnesota, at the age of two, from an orphanage in Seoul.)" This character is in trouble—her tenure application is being blocked because her translation of a Korean novel has been revealed to be full of errors. Actually, she's not fluent in Korean. Her meeting with Yoo Sun-mi, the author of the novel, takes place in the wilds of Colima, Texas, a location evoked brilliantly here and in parts of the final sequences of three stories. This trilogy, called "Les hôtels d'Alain," follows the life of minor film star Alan Kwan in three incandescent episodes showcasing, from the title on out, the author's signature dramatic irony. The first is set in Alan's youth as a CIA agent's son living in a hotel in Tokyo; it revolves around a disastrous date at an Eric Clapton concert. The second features Alan's experience during the boiling-hot, seemingly endless shoot of a narco film in El Paso. Playing a hit man forced to speak his single line in the stereotypical "Oriental" accent, he essentially destroys his career. And finally, on to his trials in middle age as a bubble tea mogul in San Francisco.
Smart, sexy, darkly funny, and enlightening stories from a master of the form.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63614-031-5
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.
A free-spirited woman forges a career as a writer and journalist, risking scandal and war zones to follow her heart.
Allende’s latest opens in San Francisco in 1873, introducing Emilia at age 7, the illegitimate daughter of Molly Walsh, who, as a novice nun, was seduced and abandoned by wealthy Chilean Gonzalo Andrés del Valle. Molly goes on to a successful marriage, Emilia grows up with a loving stepfather, and at 17 she begins writing, then publishing, sensational dime novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. By 23, she’s a journalist with a column in The Daily Examiner, though still forced to hide her gender behind her pen name. Rule breaking is in her nature, and while she accepts, for now, lower pay than men, she decides on a trip to New York to take a lover and learns to control her own contraception. Later, finally writing under her own name, she’s commissioned to go to Chile and cover its civil war from a human angle, accompanied by colleague and friend Eric Whelan, whose focus is the military aspect. Chilean revolutionary politics make for less sprightly reading, but Emilia’s individual encounters with members of high and low society lend atmosphere. These include the president, a great aunt, and eventually her father—now alone, regretful, and mortally ill. Although he disapproves of working women, the two share a “desire to see the world and experience everything intensely,” and when he offers to recognize Emilia as his legitimate child, she accepts. Now the story gathers pace, with Emilia—always and predictably the rebel—witnessing the horrors of battle, discovering that she and Eric are in love, and getting arrested. Not quite plausibly, she instigates a further sequence of impulsive moves before the story is permitted to conclude.
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593975091
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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