Chang-rae Lee has written two earlier novels that won important American prizes, and he teaches creative writing at Princeton University. But it is as if two authors with identical names wrote this book. One Chang-rae Lee tells an engrossing, even poignant story, only occasionally marring it with an unnecessary, fancy or incorrect word. The other Chang-rae Lee entangles the same story in a thicket of awful English.

For example, what does this sentence mean after its first clause? ‘The corner windows of her apartment faced north and west onto the stone-and-glass towers of Midtown, and through all the years she lived here she had never quite seen this depth of gleaming or coloration, the low

Literary Review

Jun 2010

Categories

Jonathan Mirsky

Sweet and Sour

Case Closed?

They Have Been at the Core of Great Events

Tutorials from a Transvestite

Dog Days

What’s Behind the Blue Door?

Communist Poster Boy

Invasive Procedures

Flow Country

A Right Way to Remember?

Girls Allowed

Dig for Victory

Crossing the Yalu

Dining at Lizard’s Thicket

Escape from Entebbe

Wild West

Sage Government

Mission Impossible

One Man and His Lama

A Sorority of Character

Stealing the Crown’s Jewel

Tale From Tiananmen

The Shanghai Beat

Rebel Province

Picture The Revolution