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Culture clash, survival and hope in 'pachinko'.

Jean Zimmerman

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In fiction we seek a paradox, the familiar in the foreign, new realities that only this one particular author can give us. Pachinko , the sophomore novel by the gifted Korean-born Min Jin Lee, is the kind of book that can open your eyes and fill them with tears at the same time.

Pachinko, for those not in the know, is one of the national obsessions of Japan, a dizzying cross between pinball and a slot machine, wherein small metal balls drop randomly amid a maze of brass pins. There's a comic feel of Rube Goldberg to the device, but the final effect is oddly mesmerizing. The urge to play can quickly become an addiction, and of course the game is a perfect metaphor for the ricochet whims of fate. Owning pachinko parlors becomes a way for the clan depicted in the novel to climb out of poverty — but destiny cannot be manipulated so easily.

We are in Buddenbrooks territory here, tracing a family dynasty over a sprawl of seven decades, and comparing the brilliantly drawn Pachinko to Thomas Mann's classic first novel is not hyperbole. Lee bangs and buffets and pinballs her characters through life, love and sorrow, somehow making her vast, ambitious narrative seem intimate.

"History has failed us, but no matter," she writes in the book's Tolstoyan opening sentence, hinting at the mix of tragic stoicism that is to come. During the second decade of the 20th century, as Korea falls under Japanese annexation, a young cleft-palated fisherman named Hoonie marries a local girl, Yangjin, "fifteen and mild and tender as a newborn calf." The couple has a daughter, Sunja, who grows to childhood as the cosseted pet of their rooming house by the sea in Yeong-do, a tiny islet near the Korean port city of Busan.

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As a shy, vulnerable adolescent, Sunja is the prey of a formidable middle-aged gangster named Koh Hansu. With features that make him look "somewhat Japanese," and elegant Western-style fashions such as "white patent leather shoes," Hansu embeds himself deeply into the remainder of Sunja's life. He's a Godfather, but also something of a fairy godmother. Most importantly, he provides a financial buffer when the family relocates to Osaka, Japan.

Lee deftly sketches a half-familiar, half-foreign but oftentimes harsh new world of a Korean immigrant in imperialist Japan. Sunja gives birth out of wedlock to Hansu's son, her shame erased at the last minute by marriage to a patrician, good-hearted pastor. The entwined destinies of the gangster's bastard and a second child, the son of a preacher man, become an engine that drives the story forward.

Amid the nightmare of war, the people of Osaka deal with privations. "City children were sent alone to the country by train to buy an egg or a potato in exchange for a grandmother's kimono." Sunja and her beloved sister-in-law Kyunghee have set themselves up in business making the flavorful national specialty of Korea, kimchi. Pickled cabbage serves as mode of survival, rising to symbolic importance alongside the pachinko game itself, organic and homey where the other is mechanical and sterile.

The cultures, Korean and Japanese, clash. Sunja's son, Mozasu, who owns pachinko parlors, will level with his best friend over fried oysters and shishito peppers, in a passage that lies at the heart of these characters' dilemmas: "In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastard, and in Japan, I'm just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make, or how nice I am."

Lee is at her best describing complex behaviors and emotions with unadorned, down-to-earth language. "Isak knew how to talk with people, to ask questions, and to hear the concerns in a person's voice; and she seemed to understand how to survive, and this was something he did not always know how to do." There are horrors in Pachinko — a lengthy prison term is marked by gruesome torture — but the core message remains ultimately one of survival and hope.

"Pachinko was a foolish game," Lee writes, "but life was not." The reader could be forgiven for thinking that the reverse might also be true. This is honest writing, fiction that looks squarely at what is, both terrible and wonderful and occasionally as bracing as a jar of Sunja's best kimchi.

Jean Zimmerman's latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin .

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

National Book Award Finalist

by Min Jin Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 7, 2017

An old-fashioned epic whose simple, captivating storytelling delivers both wisdom and truth.

An absorbing saga of 20th-century Korean experience, seen through the fate of four generations.

Lee ( Free Food for Millionaires , 2007) built her debut novel around families of Korean-Americans living in New York. In her second novel, she traces the Korean diaspora back to the time of Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. “History has failed us,” she writes in the opening line of the current epic, “but no matter.” She begins her tale in a village in Busan with an aging fisherman and his wife whose son is born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot. Nonetheless, he is matched with a fine wife, and the two of them run the boardinghouse he inherits from his parents. After many losses, the couple cherishes their smart, hardworking daughter, Sunja. When Sunja gets pregnant after a dalliance with a persistent, wealthy married man, one of their boarders—a sickly but handsome and deeply kind pastor—offers to marry her and take her away with him to Japan. There, she meets his brother and sister-in-law, a woman lovely in face and spirit, full of entrepreneurial ambition that she and Sunja will realize together as they support the family with kimchi and candy operations through war and hard times. Sunja’s first son becomes a brilliant scholar; her second ends up making a fortune running parlors for pachinko, a pinball-like game played for money. Meanwhile, her first son’s real father, the married rich guy, is never far from the scene, a source of both invaluable help and heartbreaking woe. As the destinies of Sunja’s children and grandchildren unfold, love, luck, and talent combine with cruelty and random misfortune in a deeply compelling story, with the troubles of ethnic Koreans living in Japan never far from view.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4555-6393-7

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016

LITERARY FICTION

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PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

BOOK TO SCREEN

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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• <em>Pachinko</em> Is a Gorgeous Adaptation of a Literary Masterpiece, Marred by One Baffling Choice

Pachinko Is a Gorgeous Adaptation of a Literary Masterpiece, Marred by One Baffling Choice

W hen Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the occupation was more than just a political reality. As Korean resistance met with ever harsher responses from the colonial government, Japanese leaders took aim at the culture itself. A strategy of forced assimilation meant the destruction of cherished art, historical documents, and buildings dating back centuries. Koreans saw their language, religion, commerce, agricultural industry, and news media supplanted by the invaders’ institutions; they even had to adopt Japanese names. Meanwhile, with scarce employment prospects in their homeland, hundreds of thousands of Koreans had little choice but to relocate to Japan, where they were mostly relegated to menial jobs and faced brutal discrimination.

This atrocity, whose impact on the Korean people still reverberates in the present, forms the backdrop of Min Jin Lee ’s magnificent 2017 novel Pachinko . The rare National Book Award finalist that is also a bestseller, populated by rich characters and suffused with emotion, Lee’s story comes to television with a lavish adaptation premiering March 25 on Apple TV+. By all accounts, it was not easy bringing this epic, multigenerational, multilingual saga of immigration and family to the small screen. Creator Soo Hugh ( The Whispers ), working with filmmakers Kogonada ( After Yang , Columbus ) and actor turned director Justin Chon, as well as a uniformly excellent ensemble cast, beautifully conveys the sweep and spirit of the novel. The only major misstep is a structural choice that undermines Lee’s carefully paced storytelling.

Spanning most of the 20th century, Pachinko opens in the woods of rural, Japanese-occupied Korea in 1915. Yangjin—a young woman born into poverty, married to the cleft-lipped son of a family that owns a boarding house and reeling from the deaths of three consecutive infant sons—has come to secure a blessing for her fourth pregnancy. “There is a curse in my blood,” Yangjin (Inji Jeong) tells the female shaman. Then the action jumps three-quarters of a century and halfway around the world, to New York in 1989. An ambitious young finance guy, Solomon (Jin Ha), strides confidently into a meeting with a pair of white, male superiors, who unceremoniously inform him that he’s not getting a promotion they all know he’s earned.

When we meet Yangjin, she’s just months away from giving birth to the show’s heroine, Sunja, whose life will be shaped by what she endures during the occupation. Solomon is Sunja’s grandson. And this eight-episode first season (of four that Hugh hopes to make) patiently fills in the intervening decades, though not with the simplistic tale of immigrant bootstrapping that newcomers to Lee’s story might expect. In one of the two parallel narratives, set in the ’30s, a teenage Sunja (played with grace, vulnerability, and grit by Minha Kim) becomes entangled with a Korean businessman, Koh Hansu (South Korean megastar Lee Min-Ho), whose flexible morals have helped him prosper in Japan. Their romance catalyzes her departure for Osaka—although, again, not for the reason you might assume. The other core story line follows Solomon’s return to Osaka, where his family still lives, with a plan to prove he’s worthy of a VP title by facilitating a crucial deal that only an employee of Korean heritage could possibly close.

There is a symmetry to this structure, one that magnifies some of Pachinko ’s most salient themes. Even though they’re poor in the ’30s and relatively rich in the ’80s, the family is constantly forced, in both eras, to choose between impossible binaries: money and integrity, safety and authenticity, assimilation and persecution. But it’s not exactly difficult to glean these ideas from Lee’s chronological structure, which I greatly prefer. There’s a trend toward multiple timelines in TV these days; complicated storytelling has become the marker of prestige drama—of television as art. Yet Pachinko was art long before it was TV. The bifurcated narrative only adds too many transitions that disrupt the series’ emotional throughline and sows confusion around characters that turn up episodes before they’re properly introduced. Readers eager to see the book’s absorbing middle chapters onscreen will have to cross their fingers for a renewal.

Such a big miscalculation might sink a weaker show, but in every other sense, Pachinko —like its heroine—is too singular and alive to fail. As portrayed by Kim in her youth and Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung in older age, Sunja epitomizes immigrant persistence without devolving into a stock character. Hugh avoids reducing her to either a martyr or a plucky success story. It was a wise choice, and one that has only become possible in the streaming era, to mix Korean, Japanese, and English dialogue; color-coded subtitles efficiently convey how characters combine tongues and code-switch. The art direction surpasses that of TV’s most immersive historical dramas, including The Crown . Complementing this intricate mise-en-scène and the cast’s fiercely physical performances is cinematography that lingers on textural details: the hem of a wedding dress, the pudgy foot of a newborn, the snowy brilliance of Korean white rice.

Yes, this adaptation is less than perfect; the disservice it does to the structural integrity of a novel that gains momentum and poignancy as the decades progress shouldn’t be understated. The overall impression is of an epochal masterpiece cut into snippets and reassembled out of order. That’s frustrating. Even when you account for its shortcomings, though, TV’s Pachinko remains the rare show of both artistic and historic import. Everyone should see it. But maybe read the book first.

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Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

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By Min Jin Lee

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• Hardcover (Large Print) $54.00 $69.00 CAD
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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around February 7, 2017. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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• Asian American
• One of Buzzfeed's "32 Most Exciting Books Coming In 2017" Included in The Millions' "Most Anticipated: The Great 2017 Book Preview" One of Elle 's "25 Most Anticipated Books by Women for 2017" BBC: "Ten Books to Read in 2017" One of BookRiot's "Most Anticipated Books of 2017" One of Nylon's "50 Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017" One of Entertainment Weekly's Best New Books One of BookBub's 22 Most Anticipated Book Club Reads of 2017
• "Stunning... Despite the compelling sweep of time and history, it is the characters and their tumultuous lives that propel the narrative... A compassionate, clear gaze at the chaotic landscape of life itself. In this haunting epic tale, no one story seems too minor to be briefly illuminated. Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen." The New York Times Book Review
• "In 1930s Korea, an earnest young woman, abandoned by the lover who has gotten her pregnant, enters into a marriage of convenience that will take her to a new life in Japan. Thus begins Lee's luminous new novel PACHINKO--a powerful meditation on what immigrants sacrifice to achieve a home in the world. PACHINKO confirms Lee's place among our finest novelists." Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her
• "A deep, broad, addictive history of a Korean family in Japan enduring and prospering through the 20th century." David Mitchell, Guardian, New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks
• "Astounding. The sweep of Dickens and Tolstoy applied to a 20th century Korean family in Japan. Min Jin Lee's PACHINKO tackles all the stuff most good novels do - family, love, cabbage - but it also asks questions that have never been more timely. What does it mean to be part of a nation? And what can one do to escape its tight, painful, familiar bonds?" Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Little Failure and Super Sad True Love Story
• "Both for those who love Korea, as well as for those who know no more than Hyundai, Samsung and kimchi , this extraordinary book will prove a revelation of joy and heartbreak. I could not stop turning the pages, and wished this most poignant of sagas would never end. Min Jin Lee displays a tenderness and wisdom ideally matched to an unforgettable tale that she relates just perfectly." Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles
• "PACHINKO is elegant and soulful, both intimate and sweeping. This story of several generations of one Korean family in Japan is the story of every family whose parents sacrificed for their children, every family whose children were unable to recognize the cost, but it's also the story of a specific cultural struggle in a riveting time and place. Min Jin Lee has written a big, beautiful book filled with characters I rooted for and cared about and remembered after I'd read the final page." Kate Christensen, Pen/Faulkner-winning author of The Great Man and Blue Plate Special
• "An exquisite, haunting epic...'moments of shimmering beauty and some glory, too,' illuminate the narrative...Lee's profound novel...is shaped by impeccable research, meticulous plotting, and empathic perception." Booklist (starred review)
• "PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee is a great book, a passionate story, a novel of magisterial sweep. It's also fiendishly readable-the real-deal. An instant classic, a quick page-turner, and probably the best book of the year." Darin Strauss, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Half a Life: A Memoir
• "The breadth and depth of challenges come through clearly, without sensationalization. The sporadic victories are oases of sweetness, without being saccharine. Lee makes it impossible not to develop tender feelings towards her characters--all of them, even the most morally compromised. Their multifaceted engagements with identity, family, vocation, racism, and class are guaranteed to provide your most affecting sobfest of the year." BookRiot, "Most Anticipated Books of 2017"
• "An absorbing saga of 20th-century Korean experience... the destinies of Sunja's children and grandchildren unfold, love, luck, and talent combine with cruelty and random misfortune in a deeply compelling story, with the trouble of ethnic Koreans living in Japan never far from view. An old-fashioned epic whose simple, captivating storytelling delivers both wisdom and truth." Kirkus (Starred Review)
• "A sprawling and immersive historical work... Reckoning with one determined, wounded family's place in history, Lee's novel is an exquisite meditation on the generational nature of truly forging a home." Publishers Weekly
• "If proof were needed that one family's story can be the story of the whole world, then PACHINKO offers that proof. Min Jin Lee's novel is gripping from start to finish, crossing cultures and generations with breathtaking power. PACHINKO is a stunning achievement, full of heart, full of grace, full of truth." Erica Wagner, author of Ariel's Gift and Seizure
• "A beautifully crafted story of love, loss, determination, luck, and perseverance...Lee's skillful development of her characters and story lines will draw readers into the work. Those who enjoy historical fiction with strong characterizations will not be disappointed as they ride along on the emotional journeys offered in the author's latest page-turner." Library Journal (starred review)
• "Brilliant, subtle...gripping...What drives this novel is the magisterial force of Lee's characterization...As heartbreaking as it is compelling, PACHINKO is a timely meditation on all that matters to humanity in an age of mass migration and uncertainty." South China Morning Post Magazine
• "Everything I want in a family saga novel, a deep dive immersion into a complete world full of rich and complex lives to follow as they tumble towards fate and fortune...PACHINKO will break your heart in all the right ways." Vela Magazine
• "Gorgeous." Nylon.com, "50 Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017"
• "Expansive, elegant and utterly absorbing...Combining the detail of a documentary with the empathy of the best fiction, it's a sheer delight." The Daily Mail
• "Deftly brings its large ensemble of characters alive." The Financial Times
• "A social novel in the Dickensian vein...frequently heartbreaking." USA Today
• "Spanning nearly 100 years and moving from Korea at the start of the 20th century to pre- and postwar Osaka and, finally, Tokyo and Yokohama, the novel reads like a long, intimate hymn to the struggles of people in a foreign land...Much of the novel's authority is derived from its weight of research, which brings to life everything from the fishing village on the coast of the East Sea in early 20th-century Korea to the sights and smells of the shabby Korean township of Ikaino in Osaka - the intimate, humanising details of a people striving to carve out a place for themselves in the world. Vivid and immersive, Pachinko is a rich tribute to a people that history seems intent on erasing." The Guardian (UK)
• "Min Jin Lee has produced a beautifully realized saga of an immigrant family in a largely hostile land, trying to establish its own way of belonging." The Times Literary Supplement
• "Lee's sweeping four-generation saga of a Korean family is an extraordinary epic, both sturdily constructed and beautiful." The San Francisco Chronicle
• " Pachinko is a rich, well-crafted book as well as a page turner. Its greatest strength in this regard lies in Lee's ability to shift suddenly between perspectives. We never linger too long with a single character, constantly refreshing our point of view, giving the narrative dimension and depth. Add to that her eye and the prose that captures setting so well, and it would not be surprising to see Pachinko on a great many summer reading lists." Asian Review of Books
• "A sweeping, multigenerational saga about one Korean family making its way in Japan. The immigrant issues resonate; the story captivates." People
• "A culturally rich, psychologically astute family saga." The Washington Post
• "[An] addictive family saga packed with forbidden love, the search for belonging, and triumph against the odds." Esquire, "Top 10 Best Books of 2017 (So Far)"
• "An intimate yet expansive immigrant story." The Michigan Daily
• "The seminal English literary work of the Korean immigrant story in Japan...Lee's sentences and the novel's plotting feel seamless, so much so, that one wonders why we make such a fuss about writing at all. Her style is literary without calling attention to its lyricism." Ploughshares
• "Effortlessly carries the reader through generations, outlining its changing historical context without sacrificing the juicy details...Life is dynamic: in Pachinko , it carries on, rich and wondrous." The Winnipeg Free Press
• "The beautiful, overwhelming tone of the novel - and the one that will stay with you at the end - is one of hope, courage, and survival against all the odds." The Iklkely Gazette UK
• "An exquisite, haunting epic." The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center & Bloom Magazine
• "As an examination of immigration over generations, in its depth and empathy, Pachinko is peerless." The Japan Times
• "Lee shines in highlighting the complexities of being an immigrant and striving for a better life when resigned to a second-class status. In particular, she explores the mechanisms of internalized oppression and the fraught position of being a "well-behaved" member of a maligned group. When history has failed, and the game is rigged, what's left? Throughout Pachinko , it's acts of kindness and love. The slow accumulation of those moments create a home to return to again and again, even in the worst of times." Paste Magazine
• "This is honest writing, fiction that looks squarely at what is, both terrible and wonderful and occasionally as bracing as a jar of Sunja's best kimchi." NPR Book Review
• "Lee is a master plotter, but the larger issues of class, religion, outsider history and culture she addresses in Pachinko make this a tour de force you'll think about long after you finish reading." National Book Review
• " Pachinko gives us a moving and detailed portrait about what it's like to sit at the nexus of two cultures, and what it means to forge a home in a place that doesn't always welcome you." Fusion
• "If you want a book that challenges and expands your perspective, turn to Pachinko ...in Lee's deft hands, the pages pass as effortlessly as time." BookPage
• "A big novel to lose yourself in or to find yourself anew-a saga of Koreans living in Japan, rejected by the country they call home, unable to return to Korea as wars and strife tear the region apart. The result is like a secret history of both countries burst open in one novel. I hope you love it like I did." Alexander Chee, author of Queen of the Night and Edinburgh writing for the Book of the Month Club
• "Sweeping and powerful" The Toronto Star
• "[An] immersive novel." BBC.com's "10 Books to Read in 2017
• "This family saga about a Korean family living in Japan sticks with you long after you've finished the 496th. I didn't want it to end." Reading Women
• "A sprawling, beautiful novel." PBS

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David Sanger of the New York Times delivers a must-read on the foreign policy challenges now facing US leaders

R ussia bombards Ukraine. Israel and Hamas are locked in a danse macabre. The threat of outright war between Jerusalem and Tehran grows daily. Beijing and Washington snarl. In a moment like this, David Sanger’s latest book, subtitled China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West , is a must-read. Painstakingly researched, New Cold Wars brims with on-record interviews and observations by thinly veiled sources.

Officials closest to the president talk with an eye on posterity. The words of the CIA director, Bill Burns, repeatedly appear on the page. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, surface throughout the book. Sanger, White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times, fuses access, authority and curiosity to deliver an alarming message: US dominance is no longer axiomatic.

In the third decade of the 21st century, China and Russia defy Washington, endeavoring to shatter the status quo while reaching for past glories. Vladimir Putin sees himself as the second coming of Peter the Great, “a dictator … consumed by restoring the old Russian empire and addressing old grievances”, in Sanger’s words.

The possibility of nuclear war is no longer purely theoretical. “In 2021 Biden, [Gen Mark] Milley, and the new White House national security team discovered that America’s nuclear holiday was over,” Sanger writes. “They were plunging into a new era that was far more complicated than the cold war had ever been.”

As Russia’s war on Ukraine faltered, Putin and the Kremlin raised the specter of nuclear deployment against Kyiv.

“The threat that Russia might use a nuclear weapon against its non-nuclear-armed foe surfaced and resurfaced every few months,” Sanger recalls.

The world was no longer “flat”. Rather, “the other side began to look more like a security threat and less like a lucrative market”. Unfettered free trade and interdependence had yielded prosperity and growth for some but birthed anger and displacement among many. Nafta – the North American Free Trade Agreement – became a figurative four-letter word. In the US, counties that lost jobs to China and Mexico went for Trump in 2016 .

Biden and the Democrats realized China never was and never would be America’s friend. “‘I think it’s fair to say that just about every assumption across different administrations was wrong,” one of Biden’s “closest advisers” tells Sanger.

“‘The internet would bring political liberty. Trade would liberalize the regime’ while creating high-skill jobs for Americans. The list went on. A lot of it was just wishful thinking.”

Sanger also captures the despondency that surrounded the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan. A suicide bombing at the Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 civilians dead. The event still haunts.

“The president came into the room shortly thereafter, and at that point Gen [Kenneth] McKenzie informed him of the attack and also the fact that there had been at least several American military casualties, fatalities in the attack,” Burns recalls. “I remember the president just paused for at least 30 seconds or so and put his head down because he was absorbing the sadness of the moment and the sense of loss as well.”

Almost three years later, Biden’s political standing has not recovered. “The bitter American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to underscore the dangers of imperial overreach,” Sanger writes. With Iran on the front burner and the Middle East mired in turmoil, what comes next is unclear.

A coda: a recent supplemental review conducted by the Pentagon determined that a sole Isis member carried out the Kabul bombing. The review also found that the attack was tactically unpreventable.

Sanger also summarizes a tense exchange between Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel , over the Gaza war.

“Hadn’t the US firebombed Tokyo during world war two? Netanyahu demanded. “Hadn’t it unleashed two atom bombs? What about the thousands who died in Mosul, as the US sought to wipe out Isis?”

On Thursday, the US vetoed a resolution to confer full UN membership on the “State of Palestine”. Hours later, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating and Israel retaliated against Iran.

N ew Cold Wars does contain lighter notes. For example, Sanger catches Donald Trump whining to Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T , about his (self-inflicted) problems with women. The 45th president invited Stephenson to the Oval Office, to discuss China and telecommunications. Things did not quite work out that way.

“Trump burned up the first 45 minutes of the meeting by riffing on how men got into trouble,” Sanger writes. “It was all about women. Then he went into a long diatribe about Stormy Daniels.”

Stephenson later recalled: “It was ‘all part of the same stand-up comedy act’ … and ‘we were left with 15 minutes to talk about Chinese infrastructure’.”

Trump wasn’t interested. Stephenson “could see that the president’s mind was elsewhere. ‘This is really boring,’ Trump finally said.”

On Thursday, in Trump’s hush-money case in New York, the parties picked a jury. Daniels is slated to be a prosecution witness.

Sanger ends his book on a note of nostalgia – and trepidation.

“For all the present risks, it is worth remembering that one of the most remarkable and little-discussed accomplishments of the old cold war was that the great powers never escalated their differences into a direct conflict. That is an eight-decade-long streak we cannot afford to break.”

New Cold Wars is published in the US by Penguin Random House

• Politics books
• US foreign policy
• US national security
• US military
• Biden administration

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How Did Fan Culture Take Over? And Why Is It So Scary?

Justin Taylor’s novel “Reboot” examines the convergence of entertainment, online arcana and conspiracy theory.

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By Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories.

• April 21, 2024
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REBOOT, by Justin Taylor

There are two kinds of novels about American life in the digital age: panoramas and selfies. The former are surveys of a wired world’s structures and networks, like Dave Eggers’s fictionalization of Big Tech in “ The Circle ” and Jennifer Egan’s interconnected New York in “ The Candy House .” The latter, like Patricia Lockwood’s “ No One Is Talking About This ” and Lauren Oyler’s “ Fake Accounts ,” are intimate portraits of the experience of being very online.

“Reboot,” Justin Taylor’s second novel (after a fine memoir about his father), splits the screen in an ambitious attempt to accommodate both, while also considering gamers, trolls, stans, chuds*, the mania of online fandom and that beloved, increasingly baroque, bloody American pastime, the conspiracy theory.

The reboot in question is of a TV show called “Rev Beach.” The narrator, David Crader; his best friend, Shayne Glade; and his ex-wife, Grace Travis, starred in this fictional amalgam of “ The O.C. ” and “ Buffy the Vampire Slayer ” some 20 years earlier. Now, lockdown-era streaming has renewed the world’s interest.

Crader, adrift in Portland, Ore., and keen to deny his alcoholism, texts Grace, a Goop-like guru whose media-mogul father has died and left her a fortune, to propose a reboot. He has money troubles and amends to make. She texts back with a long article speculating on a “Rev Beach” revival and recapping the show for the uninitiated. Crader is traveling to Los Angeles the following day for a fan convention, one of the last remaining gigs of his fast-fading celebrity, and the two agree to meet. Like that, the reboot is afoot.

But the plot is no more the point of Taylor’s book than were the exploding vampires of Sunnydale or the beach-town brawls of Orange County. The point, as always, is to get the gang back together, which Crader tries to do — only times have changed. When “Rev Beach” premiered, there was no social media, no steady drumbeat of ecological disaster, no truthers, birthers, Infowars, deep-state boogeymen or near-daily mass shootings on the nightly news. Now, a legion of online fans has made the show its own, with alternative plotlines and character arcs that any reboot would immediately render moot, and Crader fears one of those fans may crawl out of a basement with a gun in hand.

That prospect allows Crader (and Taylor) to ruminate not only on the fate of “Rev Beach” and his castmates but on America and its post-9/11 decline, while introducing a few wrinkles unique to the world of the novel, like a hollow-earth conspiracy theory full of antisemitic tropes. A berserk Amerika lurches into view, in which Crader’s life is both threatened and redeemed, and climate change has jumped the shark.

“There were fires in the gorge outside of Portland,” the book begins, after a short prelude, “and there were fires in the hills in L.A.” Ash falls like rain. Flights are canceled on the regular. A permanent haze has settled over the West Coast. When Crader travels to New York to convince Shayne, the show’s true talent and now an indie darling, to sign on to the reboot, they become the playthings of a flood. When he travels to Florida to confront a third cast member, he is the victim of bad air, hellish heat and a nasty sinkhole. Dead animals are everywhere.

“Reboot” is an anxious book. Crader’s visits to both coasts prompt misgivings about open-carry laws, boorish (male) behavior, status anxiety, parental failure and fanaticisms of all stripes. Taylor’s gently comic tone and kinetic prose make this hard-going travel easier, as do his many clever reinventions.

MAGA, QAnon and other real-life delights serve the novel as springboards for a mania more contained and malleable. “Reboot,” then, works similarly to “Rev Beach” headcanon, dreamed up by the show’s most fervent stans. Both play around with the given — the stans using the show’s three seasons, Taylor using national politics and popular culture — and ultimately steer it in directions more agreeable to their respective authors. For “Rev Beach” fans, that means orgies with the “Dawson’s Creek” cast and a lot of queer shipping. For Taylor, it means taming the chaos of recent American history and offering the reader hope, forgiveness, charity, compassion and a sense of a (happy) ending.

A novelist chases reality. If our current one eludes easy capture, points are rewarded for remaining competitive with an alternate. Taylor earns lots of points. His book is, in part, a performance of culture, a mirror America complete with its own highly imagined myths, yet one still rooted in the Second Great Awakening and the country’s earliest literature. It’s a performance full of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible something the actual streaming-posting-retweeting world, with its relentless pace and all-too-real stakes, can easily obscure, which is just how much conspiracy theory and pop culture have fused. Not just QAnon and Russiagate , but Kate Middleton and Birds Aren’t Real .

Once upon a time, popular entertainment commented on conspiracy theory, pointing to evidence of wrongdoing and the possibility of actual conspiracy. Today’s conspiracy theories are the entertainment, absurdist narratives formally arranged around tribal grudges with no obligation to truth or accountability. This fusing eliminates any attempt to get at a theory of power and becomes just another operation of it, one more tool in the autocrat’s kit. It’s so much its own thing by now that we might call it by a new name: PopCon. PopCon distracts and amuses, scapegoats and sharpens knives while answering other ancient desires, like the communalism formerly provided by network television and the shoring up of the self with lifestyle branding. The truth is out there, for just $9.99 a month.

The PopCon in “Reboot” isn’t totalizing, as Crader is its observer and instrument more than its willing participant. This offers us some relief and Taylor room to maneuver, to riff movingly on the times and to further the plot, leading Crader to his redemption, his private reboot. But as the end approaches, the book’s two strands — violent PopCon mania and the private redemption tale — grow increasingly at odds. Taylor’s panorama of online rage and real-life disaster can’t fully accommodate the selfie that is Crader’s intimate path back to good health, and the book seems caught between an honest reckoning with dread and an impulse to reassure. There will be blood, but it’s not as devastating as it deserves to be.

Maybe you won’t be bummed out, as I was, by the happy ending. Who can blame Taylor for headcanon that makes bearable the mess we’re in? His book comes out just in time for the reboot of the 2020 election, and I for one enjoy imagining Trump’s articulate and generous concession speech. “Reboot” is not half as extravagant as that fantasy, and a lot more fun than the reality dead ahead.

*Editor’s Note: A brief glossary has been provided for readers who are squinting at some of the terms used in this review.

stan : an extremely devoted fan / chud : an undesirable person / hollow earth : the belief that Planet Earth is hollow and habitable within / headcanon : personal interpretations of a fictional work, or imagined scenarios that may depart from the established conventions of their source material / shipping : envisioning a romantic or sexual relationship between two or more characters in a work / Birds Aren’t Real : a satirical conspiracy theory that all birds are spy drones in disguise.

REBOOT | By Justin Taylor | Pantheon | 284 pp. | $28

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