21 Jan 2014 02:35:35
When New Yorker critic James Wood called Chang-rae Lee's Pulitzer-shortlisted novel, The Surrendered, ambitious, well written and "alas, utterly conventional" in 2010, Lee posted on Facebook that he found the review "maddening and irritating". But his new book is his most experimental: written in the first-person plural, set in the future, with a heroine who's somewhat fictional, even within Lee's fictional world. This petite, "superbly formed" young woman, Fan, works in the fish farms of B-Mor: a sealed-off, corporation-run city-state staffed by a community shipped in decades ago from a toxic wasteland in "New China". Like all B-Mors, Fan is content enough to live a life in which "routine is the method, and the reason, and the reward", until her boyfriend disappears, and she walks through the community's gates and into the unknown.
All this, and the perilous adventures that follow, are recounted by a faceless "we", still cocooned in B-Mor, who have pieced together Fan's legend via "vids", "pix", message-board chatter and, mostly, it seems, their own dark fantasies. There are bursts of lyricism – a stretch of sky "sings its chorus of light"; pollen has a "punky reek" – but for the most part the narration is distant and exposition-heavy, allowing Fan's inner landscape to remain a mystery. Rather than political satire, or an absorbing thriller, the novel works best as a meditation on authorship, suggesting that all stories can be read as autobiographies.
