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Overview
The second novel from the critically acclaimed New York Timesbestselling author Chang-rae Lee.
His remarkable debut novel was called "rapturous" (The New York Times Book Review), "revelatory" (Vogue), and "wholly innovative" (Kirkus Reviews). It was the recipient of six major awards, including the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. Now Chang-rae Lee has written a powerful and beautifully crafted second novel that leaves no doubt about the extraordinary depth and range of his talent.
A Gesture Life is the story of a proper man, an upstanding citizen who has come to epitomize the decorous values of his New York suburban town. Courteous, honest, hardworking, and impenetrable, Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth, is careful never to overstep his boundaries and to make his neighbors comfortable in his presence. Yet as his story unfolds, precipitated by the small events surrounding him, we see his life begin to unravel. Gradually we learn the mystery that has shaped the core of his being: his terrible, forbidden love for a young Korean Comfort Woman when he served as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II.
In A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee leads us with dazzling control through a taut, suspenseful story about love, family, and community—and the secrets we harbor. As in Native Speaker, he writes of the ways outsiders conform in order to survive and the price they pay for doing so. It is a haunting, breathtaking display of talent by an acclaimed young author.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewNamed talk magazine's Top Choice of 1999 (meaning it was chosen as the best book of the year, including fiction and nonfiction), A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee is a taut, suspenseful story about love, family, and community — and the secrets we all harbor. It is the story of a proper man, an upstanding citizen who comes to epitomize the decorous values of his New York suburban town. Yet as his story unfolds, precipitated by events that take place around him, we see his life begin to unravel.
Courteous, honest, hardworking, and impenetrable, Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth, is careful never to overstep his bounds. He makes his neighbors feel comfortable in his presence, keeps his garden well tended, bids his customers good-bye at the doorway to his medical supply shop, and ignores the taunts of local boys. Now facing his retirement years alone, Hata begins to reflect on the price he's had to pay for living this quiet "gesture life."
After suffering minor injuries in an accidental fire, he remembers the painful, failed relationships of his past — with Mary Burns, a widow with whom he had an affair, and with Sunny, a Korean girl he adopted when she was seven, who is now a grown woman he hasn't spoken to or seen in years. As Hata recalls the strained, troubled relationship with Sunny, he begins to understand why his daughter, unlike himself, "felt no more at home in this town, or in this house of mine, or perhaps even with me, than when she first arrived at Kennedy Airport."
Unknown to Sunny, there is a secret that has shaped the coreofHata's being: his terrible, forbidden love for a young Korean woman from his past. Serving as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II, Hata was assigned the task of overseeing the female "volunteers" — women taken against their will to provide sexual favors for the men in the battalion. One of these "comfort women" he came to love. These remembrances, tinged with grief and regret, ultimately draw Hata once again to his daughter — and help him begin to attain a more truthful understanding of himself.
As in Native Speaker, Lee writes of the ways outsiders conform in order to survive and the price they pay for doing so. A Gesture Life is a haunting, breathtaking work that marks a dramatic step forward for this acclaimed young author. Kirkus Reviews calls Lee "a writer of exquisite intimacy and delicate disclosures — and in Hata, he's found the perfect means to explore these gifts."
R. Z. Sheppard
A Gesture Life elegantly charts the inner life of an emotionally and socially dislocated man. One of the many rewards of reading Chang-Rae Lee's new novel A Gesture Life is its reticence, a lost virtue at a time when fictional characters share intimacies.— Time
NY Times Book Review
Lee works his themes with precision and elegance...The accretion of wisdom in Lee's novel is stunning. He expertly evokes the collision of unacceptable truth with the illusion of workaday serenity...A beautiful, solitary, remarkably tender book.Verity Ludgate-Fraser
Once againthis gifted young author has given us a beautifully tapestried story of seeking identity and acceptance in another culture while remaining separate from the tug of it....The mystery of Franklin Hata's careful and proper uninvolvement with life is slowly unraveled as he ruminates....Chang-rae Lee's elegant and lustrous prose is precisely right as the voice of this touching and troubling man. —The Christian Science MonitorNewsweek
Doc Hata, the quiet and reflective narrator of Chang-rae Lee's powerful new novel, A Gesture Life, is always quick to explain that he isn't really a doctor. He got his nickname because he sold medical supplies for many years in the American suburb where he still lives. Other aspect of his life aren't precisely what they seem, either - his Japanese name, his comfortable place as a minority in town - but Hata is reluctant to acknowledge his own secrets. An imperturbable calm, stretches over his day-to-day existence like plastic wraps.Lee, the prize-winning author of "Native Speaker," guides us across this complicated terrain without a false step. By rights, "Life" should be depressing. But the writing is sure and convincing vivid and the war story unforgettable. By the end of this masterly novel, all we are is exhilarated.
New York Times Book Review
The British are somehow embarrassed about property: they used to own half the world, but they lost that and gained instead the right to buy and sell their own public housing, a fact that few British novelist have ever touched. American writers are more straight down the line when it comes to real estate: they want to believe in it, and so do their characters. This is true of the fathers of Yoknapatawpha County, and no less so of the broken young things who live in Cheever country. In the United States, owning a house means you're an American. Tending a lawn is patriotic.Franklin Hata, the narrator of Chang-rae Lee's second novel, was born in Korea and grew up in Japan; now he owns a house in Bedley Run, N.Y., a town that lies about a 50-minute drive north of Manhattan. The house is a roomy Tudor revival - it may not be the grandest house in town, but it's among the area's "special properties" - and Doc Hata, as he is widely known, is befriended by a local real estate agent, who is sure she can get him a great price for it. But Doc is not quite ready to sell: although he's in his 70's, he still has few laps to swim in his nice pool and more than a little harmonizing to do in his American life.
The accretion of wisdom in Lee's novel is stunning. He expertly evokes the collision of unacceptable truth with the illusion of workaday serenity. In "Native Speaker" Lee displayed an admirable, lyrical restraint in the face of emotional subject: the difficult and sometimes perilous process of becoming an American, and staying one, with the losses and gains that such a battle for identity entails. A Gesture Life is even beautiful, solitary, remarkably tender book that reveals the shadows that fall constantly from the past, the ones that move darkly on the lawns of the here and now.
Publishers Weekly -
Franklin Hata, born to Korean parents, raised by an adoptive family in Japan and settled in America, is the narrator of Lee's quietly stunning second novel. Like his first, the Hemingway/PEN award-winning Native Speaker, it is a resonant story of an outsider striving to become part of an alien culture. Beloved in the small, wealthy suburban New York community where for more than 30 years he ran a surgical supply store, "Doc" Hata lives a stringently circumspect life designed to afford him privacy and respect. Never married, he adopts a young girl of mixed parentage from a Japanese orphanage. He raises Sunny with strict adherence to impeccable standards, and is bewildered when she spurns his gifts and rejects his code of values. He is tormented, moreover, by memories of a gradually revealed event in his past, when he was a paramedical officer serving in the Japanese army in Burma. Then known as Ziro Kurohata, he tries to mask his Korean origins by behaving with inculcated respect for authority. But when five young Korean women arrive to service the soldiers as "comfort girls," his emotions betray him. He falls in love with one of them, and in a tentative attempt to behave heroically, he precipitates tragedy. Lee reveals these crucial events gradually in flashback, meanwhile also slowly completing his portrait of Hata as a decorous model citizen. After the war Hata determines never again to give way to emotion, so he loses an opportunity to enjoy love with a local widow, to give succor to another woman he admires, whose son is dying, and to establish real relationshops with others in the town of Bedley Run. Moreover, Sunny rebels against his stern standards, dropping out of high school and leaving town with a drug dealer. "You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness," she tells him. "You burden with your generosity." Finally, Hata is able to admit that both his exemplary behavior and his emotional reserve have been an attempt to distance himself from the dishonor of his wartime experiences. Meanwhile, he has quietly betrayed others in spite of his vow never to do so again. This ironic realization finally takes a physical toll, but opens his heart to an act of redemption. In an elegantly controlled narrative, Lee makes Hata's tortuous dilemma agonizingly real. While the prose is measured and moves to the pace of Hata's introspection, there is a rising tide of suspense that builds to two breathtaking climaxes--one at the army camp and the other in the present. Lee subtly contrasts the nuances of cultural conditioning in Japanese society and in Hata's virtual reincarnation as an American citizen, all the while delivering a haunting message about the penalties one pays for such a metamorphosis. His psychologically astute depiction of Hata's inner life is reinforced by the presence in the plot of other characters who live valiantly despite troubled lives. This is a wise, humane, fully rounded story, deeply but unsentimentally moving, and permeated with insights about the nature of human relationships. If Lee's first novel was an impressive debut, this one marks the solid establishment of a stellar literary career. Author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
Lee's second novel, after the award-winning Native Speaker, leaves little doubt about the depth of his talent. It is the story of Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth and a 30-year resident of the respectable and traditional New York hamlet of Bedley Run. Doc Hata is recently retired and plagued by real estate agents asking if he would consider putting his house on the market. He has enjoyed success as a businessman and a neighbor in his community, but his carefully constructed fa ade of politeness and prosperity mask a dark and secretive past. A random series of events, including the return of his estranged adopted daughter and her young son, cause Hata to reexamine his past while trying to keep his current life from unraveling. A Gesture Life is a suspenseful and emotional narrative, complemented by Lee's striking and luminous use of language. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/99.]--Dianna Moeller, OCLC/WLN Pacific Northwest Svc. Ctr., Lacey, WA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Talk Magazine
This book is a wonder of restraint, and its economy of language and careful pace have invited comparisons to Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. But this is a contemporary novel, and its cast of sharply drawn characters—especially Sonny, Hata's daughter—make a seemingly low adrenaline story gripping.Talk Magazine's 10 Best Books of 1999
Verity Ludgate-Fraser
Once again, this gifted young author has given us a beautifully tapestried story of seeking identity and acceptance in another culture while remaining separate from the tug of it....The mystery of Franklin Hata's careful and proper uninvolvement with life is slowly unraveled as he ruminates....Chang-rae Lee's elegant and lustrous prose is precisely right as the voice of this touching and troubling man.— The Christian Science Monitor
The Nation
Korean-American author Chang-rae Lee adds to the growing, but limited, body of fiction on the exploitation of thousands of women by the Japanese military during World War II. Fictional retelling of the plight of comfort women guarantees that their stories will not be forgotten, as much as the Japanese government may want them to be. Stifled memories about one woman in particular haunt the septuagenarian narrator of Lee's wondrous second novel, A Gesture Life.Lee's spare, careful and strangely poetic style suits the guarded speech of his genteel narrator, whether he is imparting rationalizations or elevations about his life. Lee achieves a measure skill in conveying the horror of wartime flashback scene, which reverberate throughout the rest of this finely crafted novel.