ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602090119
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY JESSIE GRAYBILL
NATIVE SPEAKER. By Chang-Rae Lee. Riverhead Books. $22.95.
Chang-Rae Lee's novel "Native Speaker" is a nice turn on the spy novel. Lee writes seamlessly in the hip idiom of contemporary fiction about Henry Park, a Korean-American who leads a complicated life as a private investigator for an agency based in the suburbs of New York City.
Park, born to Korean parents newly arrived in the United States, is weighted with his Asian experience, but as a smart kid he thrives in the American mainstream with all of the benefits of upper middle-class life. His father, though educated for quite a different life in Korea, succeeded in New York as a grocer and was a rich man by the time of his death. Park struggles with the conflicts set up by his staid family life, and at the same time he draws on the stability of his background for survival in his career as a spy.
The passages in the novel that focus on Park's life with his wife, Lelia, who characterizes herself as "an average white girl," their son, Mitt, and the dynamics with the in-laws are fascinating and beautifully played out.
Some of the faster-paced narrative, which carries the novel into the details of the private investigator's work life, is less believable, marked with the need to accomplish the plot developments essential to the genre. There are some unanswered questions in the intrigue related to John Kwang - the subject of Park's most detailed investigation.
The real interest in this part of the story for me is Park's careful analysis of Kwang's character as a mirror of his own. Both Korean-Americans, their lives have taken very different turns.
The validity of Lee's voice and his ability to speak to the true nature of family life as it informs our experience of American culture give the novel its power. "Native Speaker" could be said to be about otherness, but it really seems to me to reach to the heart of what isolates us from one another. Park feels distant from his native culture, but at the same time he connects with people - loved ones, colleagues, strangers - in a fast-moving, alien and often alienating culture.
Jessie Graybill teaches at Roanoke College
LENGTH: Short : 46 linesby CNB