Leaning into tomorrow

Sadly, I finished Free Food for Millionaires two nights ago and am consoling myself by reading Liesl Schillinger's glowing review:

Casey has acquired her outsize sense of personal destiny from two sources: her mentor, Sabine (an immigrant from her mother’s village in Korea who has built a successful fashion business and married a rich American), and a handful of British authors whose works she reads again and again: George Eliot, the Brontë sisters and Trollope. Their fiction, Casey notices, bears an uncanny resemblance to the “Korean fairy tales her mother used to tell her,” in which good things came to clever and virtuous women who followed the paths of “sacrifice and integrity.”

But growing up in Queens at the end of the 20th century — rather than in the British countryside in the 19th century or on the outskirts of Seoul in the aftermath of the Korean War — Casey finds she has little appetite for the “sacrifice” part of the fantasy she savored as a child: “She had a strong desire to be happy and to have love, and she’d never considered such wishes to be Korean ones.” Her mentor reinforces the message that she must write the script for her own future.

I wish there were more chapters to this one--not because I need to know what "happens next," but because I enjoyed Casey's company and the tangled mess that is her life. It was a surprising relief to find so many familiar conflicts and situations in these pages--conflicts that I haven't read enough of. How do you reconcile the person you're becoming with where you came from? Is it really a form of betrayal to have differing values from your (immigrant) parents? Her struggles with the Bible were familiar as well. I admire her willingness to wrestle with texts that are difficult to wholly understand or come to terms with. But she keeps reading, living, questioning...while forging her own identity in the process.

This book felt like an old friend. I am very happy to keep it on these shelves.

Jumping the queue

There's a new book in the house and all of a sudden it's claimed my full attention. I had thought Shantaram would do this, but because of its "inspirational" nature, it's been relegated to rough night/insomnia reading. I feel more than a little chagrin as I type this because of the raw, heartbreaking nature of the story. Roberts depicts the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of India wonderfully (at least from the perspective of this someone who's never traveled there), and his love for the people is beautiful to read. But it seems that every event becomes some sort of profound life lesson. Is there anything really wrong with this? There shouldn't be--but there is. The open willingness to convert every adventure or misfortune into a mini morality tale robs the book of some of its wonder. I don't want all of my jagged edges smoothed down into inoffensive niceties.

Meanwhile, Free Food for Millionaires has lines like this:

She suddenly hated him for being an American and herself for feeling so foreign when she was with him. She hated his ideals of rugged individualism, self-determination--this vain idea that life was what you made of it--as if it were some sort of paint-by-numbers kit. Only the most selfish person on earth could live that way.

I love it. I can see how this interpretation of things could confound or irritate some readers, but that's the point. The typical U.S. mindset is held up against the values of another culture, and all of a sudden we're seeing ourselves as others see us.

But this novel is no mere critique of America:

Casey was selfish, she knew that, but she had no wish to hurt anyone. If her rotten choices hurt her, well then, she'd be willing to take that wager, but it was hard to think of letting her parents down again and again. But her choices were always hurting her parents, or so they said. Yet Casey was an American, too--she had a strong desire to be happy and to have love, and she'd never considered such wishes to be Korean ones.

There's a deceptive simplicity to all this due to its apparent clarity. But Min Jin Lee is unrelentingly fair to her characters, letting us into their heads and seeing situations as they do. The internal conflict this creates in the reader provides a small glimpse of what may perpetually rattle around inside a U.S.-raised child of immigrants, while exposing the danger of seeing both sides of an issue to such an extent that they cancel each other out, leaving a nondescript neutrality that can cripple one's own identity, even as it's attempting to come into being.

So I will eventually finish Roberts' heartfelt book and Pynchon's sprawling masterpiece (currently on p. 351 with Dally in New York). But for now, I am fascinated and strangely comforted by Lee's portrayal of the paradoxes and complexities that inhabit a young woman who embodies two cultures.

Loving fully

Min Jin Lee (posting over at Chekhov's Mistress) on Middlemarch:

A truly good book as fine as this one can provide an alternative to what is before us. An author as smart as Eliot can provide insight, amusement, but most of all worthy companionship. I fear that I sound like a crank about real life, and perhaps I am somewhat guilty, but I have to say too, that reading a book like Eliot’s has given me a greater sense of compassion toward new acquaintances and wisdom in how I can love better the seasoned members of my coterie. For Eliot cared a great deal about being a wise person who loved fully, and in her world of Middlemarch, she offered another paradigm--of how things are and how things should be. Eliot understood people, their limitations and their ambivalence. She did not judge their flaws, instead she let them live through their truths in drama—far more compelling to this reader than a stack of sermons (and by the way, I am fond of a well-written sermon, too).