KEPT

Judith Lee, Ivy League daughter of a distinguished Korean family, is ready to start her life.

The only problem is that her skills are limited to playing the piano, quoting 19th-century literature, peppering conversations with French witticisms and buying the most tasteful clothing the boutiques of Manhattan offer. Vain, indulged and rather full of herself, Jude is out of money and is not likely to get any from her parents, who have suddenly decamped along with their bank account to Korea. Her beautiful and cosmopolitan aunt suggests that Jude become a kept woman, and with some misgivings Jude moves in with the excitable and manipulative Madame Tartakov, an ex-ballerina who supplies millionaires and business tycoons with elite paid companions. Jude’s scruples disappear quickly, and she falls into an easy relationship with the concert violinist with whom Madame Tartakov has paired her. The trouble comes when she falls in love with an irritatingly moral philosophy graduate student named Joshua and discovers that it’s as hard to leave the life of a courtesan as it initially was to enter it. But all’s well that ends well—although Joshua finds out and reviles Jude, he soon finds his way back to her, and she in turn finds a sophisticated but infinitely more upstanding job. Along the way, Jude travels to Korea and discovers life-changing family secrets in a subplot that is one of the few flaws in this otherwise delightful novel. Hong captures narrator Jude’s narcissism and her moral equivocations with wicked skill.

Not for nothing does Hong begin the book with a quote from Thackeray; this is Vanity Fair’s close cousin.