A Gesture Life

...Lee writes with such urgency, such invention, such intelligence, and such fidelity to the truth of his characters' lives that I have been pressing his books on friends, students, and innocent bystanders as novels that must be read...

...The novel is not perfect (though if s close...

...Commonweal 20 December 17,1999...

...A Gesture Life, because it is dealing with a once-hidden, now well-known horror of World War II, has a narrower political focus and a clearer political point...

...A supposedly accidental fire in his house (there are no accidents in Freud or in fiction) leads Hata on an internal exploration of his past...

...But A Gesture Life is not a history of the comfort women...

...The only scenes that may approach surrealism in a reader's mind are, in fact, the completely realistic (though restrained) wartime scenes...

...Furthermore, Franklin Hata's story is generous enough to allow for the possibility of redemption...

...The novel shifts between Henry's suggestive detective role (his spy business is familiar in a fantastic, cinematic way) and his domestic life (painstakingly realistic...

...Lee opens his story of Franklin Hata, a Japanese of Korean birth, in the present...

...It is, however, a very different kind of book: Native Speaker's charged, energetic language disappears here in favor of a more formal (and completely engaging) first-person narrative voice...

...The seesawing between the public and the private, the real and the almost-real, allows a precarious balance, with Henry's almost unspeakable emotions suggested primarily by indirection...

...Valerie Sayers Chang-rae Lee, after only two novels, has already established himself as what reviewers like to call "an important voice" in American fiction...

...Native Speaker's protagonist, Henry Park, works for a nearly surreal spy agency, uncovering the secret lives of other immigrants...

...Generally, though, Lee's skills are so sure that a reader moves effortlessly through these pages, emotionally draining though they are...

...It's hard for others to know how consuming one's arrival in a new land can be, how it will take up the very last resources of spirit," Hata says, acknowledging what immigration has cost him...

...it is an exploration of the lifelong effects of their victimization on one of the soldiers asked to victimize them...

...they suggest fully the horrors visited on the comfort women (and the dehumanizing effects of the soldiers' own actions on themselves) but they never indulge in narrative voyeurism...

...It is harder for him to acknowledge what it has cost his adopted daughter Sunny, who has been at first dutiful, then resentful, later openly rebellious...

...The restraint of the dramatization grants the women a dignity they were not granted historically...

...He moves simultaneously down two paths of memory: one of his life with Sunny, who fled his house in favor of life with a drug dealer, and one of his experiences with the comfort women...

...The real power of Lee's witness lies in his willingness to connect a specific set of horrors to a much larger human tendency to conceal and to repress, to hide the truth behind material goods...

...Lee's characterization of American suburbs is as quietly devastating as his characterization of this man who has hidden away his past...

...one device Lee resorts to repeatedly is setting Hata in close proximity to other characters, so that he can overhear them or watch them without actually being in the scene...

...His wealthy suburb suits his predilection for privacy: "In this area of expansive two- and three-acre lots, there is no such thing as gabbing over a hedge...

...The two roads intersect at the point of Hata's responsibilities to these women...

...A Gesture Life is an important novel—indeed, a crucial novel...

...Lee's first novel, Native Speaker (1995), explores the twentieth-century immigrant experience from the perspective of a young Korean-American whose father has labored his way to wealth in the fruit-markets of New York...

...The purposeful, dignified, pleasant language Lee uses to depict Hata is a reflection of the man...

...The connections among the different truths of Hata's life are peeled away with skill and delicacy...

...In Native Speaker, Lee is provocateur, catching the reader off guard by portraying a sympathetic character who is nonetheless an equal-opportunity spy, betraying disciples of Ferdinand Marcos and Chinese democracy alike...

...Hata is an upstanding citizen of Westchester County, New York, an immigrant who has built a thriving business, Sunny Medical Supply, and who has now retired, wealthy and well-respected...

...Lee's structural decisions in telling this complicated story reflect both his aesthetic and his moral sensibilities...

...We learn that Hata, as a young medical officer, was put in charge of the "volunteers...

...I'm more inclined to call it a crucial voice...

...What is most striking—besides the novel's easy assurance— is Lee's decision to move his narrative right up to the boundaries of realism, as if to acknowledge realism's limitations in portraying the pain of immigrants...

...The wartime scenes are remarkable feats of narrative control...

...The stories are, of course, related, and require Hata to confront the sexuality of his daughter, who chooses promiscuity for rebellion and escape, and that of the comfort women, who are raped systematically Commonweal 19 December 17,1999 and have no means of escape...

...Each story is compelling, but their juxtaposition allows Lee to explore each fully and to cut away precisely at the moment when melodrama looms...

...Such are the pitfalls of the first-person narrative...

...He fell in love with one and now must confront his complicity in their captivity...

...Hata is a man of impeccable manners—the gestures of the title— who has calculated precisely the moves he must make to be accepted in his community...

...The subject at the novel's heart is the plight of the Korean "comfort women" of World War II, young women tricked and drafted into service as sex slaves to Japanese soldiers...

...A Gesture Life, Lee's new novel, matches Native Speaker in ambition, scope, and balance, and also acknowledges the limits of conventional historical realism in exploring the unthinkable...

...Lee is a political writer, but his two novels aim at very different political targets...

...Valerie Sayers is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Notre Dame...