THE APOLOGY

A 105-year-old Korean woman embarks on a journey to America to prevent a wedding.

Hak Jeonga dies at the age of 105, killed by a bus in Chicago. Narrating from the afterlife, she fills in the events leading up to the accident. Ten days prior, she’d received a letter from Joyce, the granddaughter of her estranged sister, Seona, who’d eloped to North Korea when she was young and never saw her family again. The letter, as it turns out, is a request for money: Joyce’s son, Jordan, is terribly ill, and they need to raise $70,000 for an experimental treatment. What concerns Jeonga most in the letter, however, is the brief reference to Jordan’s fiancee, Ellery Arnaud. Ellery is also the name of Jeonga’s illegitimate great-granddaughter. After some sleuthing confirms that Ellery Arnaud is indeed her descendant, Jeonga proceeds to plan a trip to America, ostensibly to give the money to Joyce in person, but in reality, to try to forestall Jordan’s marriage to Ellery. The narrator, in spite of her old age, speaks like a child. The sentences are short, simple, and prosaic, the sentiments immature. The novel relies too much on the uniqueness of the narrator’s identity as an elderly Korean woman without doing the work to make her convincing. One wishes that the plot could be the novel’s saving grace, but this is not the case. The stakes feel low, and as a result, the plot crawls, filled with geographical movement (from Seoul to San Francisco to Chicago to the afterlife) but lacking in emotional depth. The catharsis, when it comes, feels cheap, sagging with thinly rendered apologies.

An unwieldy novel about family reconciliation.