THE LUCKY GOURD SHOP

A heartfelt, though oddly shaped, second novel from the other Joanna Scott, whose writings about the collision of Eastern and Western cultures include both nonfiction and her well-received novel, Charlie and the Children (1997).

The arresting opening pages here efficiently dramatize the uneasy assimilation to their new home (in America) of its unnamed narrator’s three adopted children: South Korean siblings whose heritage and early life she then imagines into a fully fledged narrative. It’s focused at first on their mother Mi Sook, herself a foundling raised by successive owners of the eponymous shop (which offers richly decorated gourds as good-luck charms), and by the naïve second wife of a much older man. He is Kun Soo, a laborer and truckdriver eager to shed the wife who had borne him “only” a houseful of daughters and a single brain-damaged son. Scott’s detailed pictures of Korean village and city life are fascinating, and her patient analysis of Kun Soo’s slow decline (following his first wife’s death, and his troubled marriage to Mi Sook) skillfully draws the reader in. The nexus of rigid role expectations, peasant superstition, and aggrieved male pride that drive her to fantasies of adultery and him to fateful inarticulate rage are consistently dramatic and absorbing. Unfortunately, the lengthy dénouement—in which Kun Soo’s stoical elderly mother furtively yet firmly takes control of her grandchildren’s welfare—reads more like message than fiction, and diffuses the force of the much richer (if likewise generic) conflict at the book’s core. Scott tacks on a brief history of Mi Sook’s unhappy afterthought-romance with an American soldier, and her son Dae Young’s narrow escape from a life of crime. But these feel like starting-points for a novel she hasn’t written. And the story simply, abruptly ends, without further reference to the frame in which it is seemingly presented.

Many good moments here, and some wonderfully empathetic characterizations, but they don’t add up to anything like a unified whole.