Chang-rae Lee is one of our great writers of dislocation and doubt. In novels like Native Speaker and The Surrendered, Lee deployed fairly elaborate premises (multigenerational historical sagas, spy stories, dystopian apocalypses) to probe the ambiguities of self-knowledge and social belonging. A Tender Age, his seventh, is a more intimate affair. The narrator, Jeon-Gi, known to his friends as J.G., is the first child and only son in a family of Korean immigrants who settle in a fictional town in the Westchester County, New York, suburbs. Ten years old in 1976, J.G. appears to be adjusting well to his new life, succeeding at school and interpreting the English language for his parents. He even spends his spare time building model airplanes and playing with the multiethnic group of working- and middle-class children who live in the same run-down tenement complex.
Yet, at the start of the novel, as he peers back on his youth from middle age, J.G. begins to detect warning signs of the troubled man he would become. “We can’t help but keep going back to old times,” he muses, “futilely scratching at a spot.” He sees a boy who is angry and fearful, clinging desperately to his mother while concealing the physical and sexual humiliations thrown at him by other (white) kids on the playground. He tries to take this bullying in stride, suppressing his fear and shame until it comes exploding out of him as rage. One day, hoping to scare off a particularly sadistic older boy, he brings a knife to school and nearly stabs one of his friends. “To this day,” he reflects, “I’ve never seen a person so scared.”
These are not the events that really spur our adult narrator to reflection. Hoping to help their young son, J.G.’s parents send him to a series of child psychologists, and eventually to a summer camp run by the Korean church the family occasionally attends. For the first time in his life, the soon-to-be 11-year-old is surrounded entirely by other Korean kids, including a beautiful girl called Susan with a “manga” haircut and a boy named Dickens with abs and a rage complex. J.G. begins to indulge both his best and his worst instincts, making friends and then lying to them about his life back home, pining after a girl, and indulging the pain of her half-rejection until it erupts from him in an act of attempted self-harm that will mark him for the rest of his young life.
This is a story about the pain and shame that often lie coiled at the heart of an otherwise unexceptional life. Unfortunately, consistently poor novelistic choices produce a largely bland, unexceptional novel, the literary equivalent of one of those dutiful Sundance social dramas that sell for a few million dollars, then disappear immediately from view. Though told retrospectively, A Tender Age has neither the vividness of memory nor the immediacy of experience. Lee reuses metaphors (the collapsing of an ice sheet is especially popular), implements clunky phrases (“the world seemed to balance on the fulcrum of me”), and narrates the entire thing in an easy-breezy tone that rarely embodies or enriches the material under discussion.
This discrepancy between the material and its execution is most glaring in those moments when the boy’s anger and self-hatred supposedly overwhelm him. Still concerned about the effect that moments of overwhelm had on him as a child, adult J.G. regularly informs us about his upended psychic and emotional states, his desire “to be seared with punishment…to be destroyed.” Yet because his statements about his inner life are delivered in the same bemused register as the surrounding statements, there is no tension to them, no threat or real concern. When the young J.G. meets his bunkmates, he immediately experiences “the strangest urge to pick a fight with one of them, to bruise and to be bruised.” This sentence is all we get of his ostensible bloodlust; it doesn’t inflect according to his memories of the other characters, does not color his response to their behavior or charge the tone of the resulting descriptions. It simply stands alone, a landmark to guide us across the boy’s scorched emotional landscape. Yet because his actual feelings so rarely convince, the novel refuses the reader anything like real access to J.G.’s emotional world. Lee might want us to feel alongside J.G.; in the end, we barely feel for him.
The result is a novel that fails to capture sensation or experience, relying on page after page of description, rendered in that superfluous, conversational nonstyle far too common among contemporary American works of fiction. This is a real shame, for there are select moments of genuine power in A Tender Age when the old, ambitious Lee pushes through. He retains that unparalleled gift for economy, rendering vivid psychic states from minimal persistent details: a screeching voice, a pained ankle. Certain scenes, including a scared-straight visit to a local prison and an extended climax set during a summer downpour, braid together currents of humor and awe and fear.
Across the novel’s 350-plus pages, however, these moments are far too few, their controlled mastery completely missing from the descriptive mush that surrounds them. “A life can catch up to you,” Lee writes at the start. Reading A Tender Age, I thought it never would.•
