Far From Brooklyn

This is just to set down an idea that came to me while reading–and before having finished (or put aside, we’ll see)–Chang Rae Lee’s “My Year Abroad.”

The idea, put simply, is that some books are just too booky. By booky, I mean a highly self-conscious performance of literature. “My Year Abroad” is entertaining (so far) and energetically written, with some nifty turns of phrase–a rich suburb is described as being rife with “apex MILF”–but it doesn’t ring quite true as a portrait of humans. It’s just too booky.

“My Year Abroad” reminds me, in both its strengths and weaknesses, of Gary Shteyngart’s “Lake Success,” which is full of authorial fireworks but even more so chockablock with showy details about, well, just about anything–the ins and outs of bond trading, collectible watches, and so on. Shteyngart did his research and he wants you to know it. But “Lake Success” doesn’t really come off as a narrative of an actual life. It’s cartoonish.

In the case of “My Year Abroad,” a number of highly polished details in the early chapters just go clank: for instance, the narrator, a callow college dropout describes his mentor-to-be this way: “His regular gig was as a bench chemist at a global pharma giant.” The terms “global pharma giant” and especially “bench chemist” are used only by older folk, and in particular by older folk who like to collect linguistic ephemera. That is: novelists.

I presumably will have more to say about this later, but the point is not that I don’t enjoy this book. To the contrary, it’s fun and at times funny – like “Lake Success.” But it feels somehow flossy and insubstantial to me, like a magic show, or opera buffa. It’s an entertainment. I’m not sure why that seems like a criticism, I don’t exactly mean it to be one, but I know that there is more than a hint of criticism in that term, “entertainment.”

I suppose if I want an entertainment, that means (to me) that I want something less literate, less observed; more eventful and faster moving. It’s also difficult, in this day and age, to put forward any book as an entertainment… there’s just too much purely entertaining streaming media available at the touch of a button. A novel needs to deliver an emotional or an intellectual punch if it is to justify itself.

By the way, the Shteyngart book occupies an unusual place in my reading history. I loved his “Super Sad Love Story” and was deeply impressed by “Absurdistan,” so I opened “Lake Success” with a lot of anticipation. I read it in full, but never felt completely involved in it. And then, for some reason, I finished it and immediately read it again, start to finish! Even though I hadn’t “liked” it much.

I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. Of course there are many books I have read many, many times over. But I can’t think of one that I reread immediately upon finishing it for the first time. The fact that I did so without fully buying into the narrative is really mystifying to me. So who knows, maybe I’ll finish off “My Year Abroad” with quibbles, and then turn back to page one and make another round trip. We’ll see.

Postscript: I didn’t get much further in “My Year Abroad.” Its sheer bookiness did it in. I admired the writing but didn’t want to read it. Does that make any sense???