Chang-Rae Lee Bores Us Endlessly with Tedious Future Worlds

The description on the sleeve and in critical reviews made Chang-Rae Lee's new novel On Such a Full Sea a dead ringer for something I wanted to read.

I should have stuck with reading just the sleeve and the reviews.

Because that's all I enjoyed upon reading the full book. Lee is no doubt a talented descriptive writer, but the story and plot of Full Sea are such non-entities that the whole thing felt like a monumental waste of time (I can't wait to get back to reading the much more entertaining Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson that I put down for this high-art claptrap).

The before-mentioned sleeve describes a world we will venture into that has never been imagined before. And indeed, the premise is immaculate: Chinese cities of the future becoming uninhabitable because of pollution and entire populations being moved over to form new colonies in U.S. cities. The book never really goes into what happened to the people who used to live in the U.S. But the focus is on the newish settlers B-Mor (formerly Baltimore).

The people of B-Mor are North Korea-like workers for the common good and protected for their services (albeit never do much more than sit around and smoke). Their job is to cultivate seafood for rich people out in villages walled off from unruly and deadly free-roaming states throughout the rest of the country.

Fan, the protagonist, is a 16-year-old pregnant girl who mysteriously leaves B-Mor in search of her older brother and boyfriend, who have also mysteriously left. The novel is told from the voices of B-Mor citizens who form a (ridiculous) mythology around Fan. She bounces from place to place (or, as the sleeve will entice you: magical worlds) where truly nothing much happens. This goes on and on.

I kept expecting something to happen, but it never did. For anyone who enjoys a good yarn, this is definitely not the place.

** out of ***** stars (because I'm feeling generous today)

North Korea's Alien Tentacles Illuminated in The Orphan Master's Son

The Orphan Master’s Son is the best new novel I’ve read in a few years.

Its disorienting series of flashbacks and flash-forwards is like the movie Memento, and the surreal feeling of being in alien North Korea is overwhelming in an almost science-fiction, 1984-like way.

The 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner starts out a little slow. At parts during the first 100 pages, I wasn’t sure I would make it through all 450 pages. But it picked up quickly as the protagonist Pak Jun Do leaves the orphanage where he’s grown up to become a radio operator on a ship that plucks people off Japanese beaches to torture or kill.

An alleged battle at sea with a group of Americans results in a great national tale of how Pak Jun Do fended off a shark while trying to save one of his shipmates. This heroism leads Pak Jun Do to be selected for a diplomatic mission to Texas, and he later becomes one of the few North Koreans to have a knowledge that what it’s like in the U.S. is quite a bit different than what the loudspeakers regularly report to the citizens.

This is the point when the novel truly becomes a page-turner. The Texas mission is deemed a failure and Pak Jun Do’s fellow diplomats are disposed of in a torturously violent fashion that is typical of this often cringe-worthy tale. Pak Jun Do is allowed to live but sent to work in an unbearably harsh prison mine.

Adam Johnson and the cover of his book

He survives this episode and his toughness is noted, as North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, summons him to transform into Commander Ga, who was the country’s tae kwon do hero but has gone missing. Ga’s wife is Sun Moon, the country’s most famous actress, and Pak Jun Do/Commander Ga finds himself in a new, again, surreal world. Sun Moon is initially not happy to have a “replacement husband,” but she eventually accepts that it is what the Dear Leader and her country need from her.

Ga, because of his experience with the Americans, is called upon again in a hostage situation in which an American rower has been plucked from the seas by North Korea. Ga finds a way to outwit the Dear Leader during the handoff of this prisoner, who has been tormented by Kim Jong Il in unimaginable ways.

But then again, the unimaginable becomes the horrific stuff of every few pages in The Orphan Master’s Son. By the end, the weirdness of the country is almost laughable, although in reality it is Holocaust-level heart-wrenching. 

Author Adam Johnson has done a brilliant job of capturing the most unknown country on the planet. The Stanford professor visited Pyongyang and a few other parts of the country while doing his research. Even he admits that it’s tough to know too much about the country since ordinary citizens are never allowed to speak to foreigners. But he has gotten us closer to an understanding, and closer to knowing what a strange, different, fascinating, and seemingly harsh place it is.

***** out of ***** stars

You For Me For You. How About None of Them?

I saw You For Me For You a couple of weeks ago at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington DC and almost immediately forgot the details of the play's content. So reviewing this now is mildly daunting.

But what I do remember is that it was about North Korea, which is, of course, an endlessly fascinating and mysterious place. Unfortunately, instead of taking any chances or being truly interesting, the show stuck to the script that North Koreans think Americans are the crazy ones and, conversely, their fearless leader has them set on the correct course.

Two sisters decide to escape from the country and their miserable lives, but the sister that is starving and unhealthy decides she can't leave. The other sister makes it to the U.S. and embarks on a relatively happy new life. She drops it all, however, as things reach a high point and returns to North Korea to reunite with her sister.

Sounds interesting, actually. But the story plods, the characters aren't particularly interesting, and the lack of chances taken by playwright Mia Chung makes it puzzling that this production seems to be so successful

I've been complaining about Woolly Mammoth's shows for a while now, and I really miss the stuff that once made this theater DC's best. Could it be that theater in general just kinda stinks these days?

*** out of ***** stars

Photograph by Scott Suchman