“Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?” — Los Angeles Times “One of our most silken storytellers.” —The Boston Globe “An extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across its many movements—and this is ...

The first thing that all of us at NUBClub agreed on was that My Year Abroad was a good book. Lee wrote a funny, poignant, and insightful novel with interesting characters, clever twists, and a good dash of craziness. A lot of conversation talked about the way that identity played in the book. Some of that had to do with racial identity. Tiller's understand of his own Asian identity mirrored nicely Pong's transformation as he left the United States and became less and less American as the novel progressed, and Lee has some great send-ups of the kinds of Americans who go abroad for experience. At the same time, the novel looks a lot at the identities that people hold in families, and the domestic situation of Tiller, Val, and Victor Jr is a great counterpoint to the travel plot, given us a chance to see how fathers, mothers, and children can co-exist and what their responsibilities are to each other. While the plot moved in a pretty obvious way, there were a lot of interesting parallels between all of the ways that the main characters (Tiller, Val, Pong) came from broken homes of one form or another, and then how those experiences led them to either take responsibility or betray those that they loved in different ways. The description of Pong's parents and how they were destroyed by Mao's Cultural Revolution was stunningly good writing -- that could have been an entire great novel by itself. And Lee's identity exploration spills nicely into the lies we tell ourselves, whether that's Tiller's willingness to believe Pong's false praise of his talents as Pong tricks him into being the fall guy for the con, or the unclear level of talent of Victor Jr. and what their domestic life is or can be. The novel makes a major turn to the absurd in an almost Pynchonesque way in the last third, and as the con that Pong has pulled on Tiller becomes revealed, the books starts to slip a bit. It's hard to take the anguish Tiller suffers after the con is revealed when that torture is using a giant mortar to make curry eight hours a day. Lee confusingly has some very weird elements (a yoga competition and then a later scene were someone is killed by having his back bent in half) that strain credibility, but also makes some very obvious moves (how Val and Tilller's plot resolves) which makes the end of the book a bit uneven and tonally mixed. And we wished that Pong's motivations for the con were more compelling -- it seemed a bit duct-taped how Pong got involved in a plot that could destroy several people's lives. But none of this criticism was that harsh. In the end, we liked A Year Abroad. It's not the best novel that we've read, but as a fun, absurd, and occasionally very beautiful novel, it was definitely worth the trip.