The Nature of Things

  I was very excited to get my hands on the new Chang-Rae Lee book. I've heard and read so much praise for his previous books, none of which I had ever read even though I had the best intentions of doing so. So I jumped at the chance to read this one. I found his writing to be very controlled, directed, and philosophical in the way that he developed his narrative. The narrative, in other words, seemed to take us exactly where Lee wanted us to go, but that was not necessarily a good place. Lee's protagonist is a 20-year-old college student from New Jersey named Tiller, who at the time that we meet him has had some sort of traumatic experience that has brought him, for reasons that are unknown, to the Hong Kong airport, where he meets Val, a single mother in her 30s who is also from New Jersey. It turns out they have things in common; Val, too, has had some kind of trauma in her life and they are each one-eighth Asian in heritage and both are only children. These commonalities fo...