A TENDER AGE

A man looks back on the small wounds and larger traumas of his youth.

Jeon-Gi, the narrator of Lee’s intimate seventh novel, recalls himself as a 10-year-old boy in 1976, a pivotal time for this son of Korean immigrants. In the apartment complex north of New York City where his family has recently moved, the children’s identities are based on racial and ethnic groups, as well as their capacity and willingness to dominate others. One girl ropes Jeon-Gi into various urine-related humiliations; a set-to with another boy escalates until Jeon-Gi, desperate, brings a knife to school and threatens his bully with it. Hoping for a behavioral reset, Jeon-Gi’s parents send him to a church-run summer camp, where the bulk of the novel takes place. There, he has some of the more typical primal experiences of youth—a first crush, first serious friendships, first glimpse of sex and other transgressive acts, and the first glimmer of independence. Naturally, all those firsts lead to plenty of clumsy moments, from a botched initial effort at cooking a camp stew to something not unlike a first kiss. But Lee plays this less as a lighthearted coming-of-age story than a study of emotional fragility, as Jeon-Gi’s will to succeed and fit in collides with a psyche that’s easily damaged, culminating in a somber and consequential climax. There’s a reason, after all, Jeon-Gi is compelled to remember that time, and the book’s power lies in Lee’s forensic examination of his narrator’s treatment by others, and Jeon-Gi’s complex responses to them. He became a boy “preoccupied with the idea that I might be the kind of person certain bad things happened to,” and this close reading of a life exposes just how difficult it can be to shake those deeply imprinted moments.

A melancholy, emotionally rich story of preadolescent struggles.