A Deeply Layered Novel About Masculinity

Tangled themes of violence and masculinity run like buried cables through Chang-rae Lee’s work.

One of contemporary American literature’s major chroniclers of manhood, he’s been writing for three decades about assimilation, suburban alienation, and the mystery of how his characters survive loneliness and, often, shocking loss.

Lee uses his careful prose to sink slowly and deeply into the minds of men who resist thinking about their feelings, even as they ruminate obsessively about their past griefs.

His new novel, A Tender Age , would belong in this meditative lineage, except that its narrator, a middle-aged man named Jeon-Gi, doesn’t resist emotion in the slightest.

He’s as sensitive to—and as fascinated by—its lingering effects as his creator is.

And unlike some of Lee’s earlier protagonists, this character wants to know himself.

Jeon-Gi opens the book by confessing that he’s consumed by the “nature of certain youthful happenings, how they can become a knot in the flesh that every other occurrence must bypass in order for you to know yourself.” He then recounts, in vivid detail, the events of the summer he turned 11, which have haunted him ever since.

The novel wobbles between manhood and boyhood, clarity and confusion, self-knowledge and a windmilling search for identity by a 10-year-old faced with challenges he’s too young to comprehend.

Nearly all of Lee’s fiction—from his debut, Native Speaker (1995), through his war novels, A Gesture Life (1999) and The Surrendered (2010), to his rollicking bildungsroman, My Year Abroad (2021)—shares a worry that the masculine ideals of self-sufficiency, strength, and swagger can lead to brutality.

Now, for the first time, Lee traces the concern back to boyhood, a risky move: Young Jeon-Gi’s travails are conventional ones, the fodder of many coming-of-age stories.

He gets bullied, lands in trouble defending himself, and then attempts a reinvention.

What sets A Tender Age apart is its layered narration, in which a reflective adult and resurrected child together lead the reader onward as Lee strings threats of violence through the text, building thrillerlike tension.

As the eldest child of Korean immigrants, Jeon-Gi feels called on to be “the head of the column” as he, his parents, and his sister navigate life in the United States.

Among peers, meanwhile, he feels rising pressure to prove that he’s a cool insider, not a weakling or a “wuss,” to use a word Lee repeats often in the book’s opening section.