I'm finding it difficult to shake the impression this book made on me.

It's a dark but beautiful coming-of-age story about Fee, a biracial Korean-American boy who participates in a boys' choir over a period of years. Over the years, the choir director sexually molests a dozen or so of the boys, including Fee. The perpetrator is finally caught and arrested, but he leaves a trail of broken, ruined lives in his wake.

Fee has trouble separating what has happened to him from his own incipient desire for his buddies in the choir. In particular, he has fallen in love with a beautiful young blond boy who has also been broken and ruined by the choir director. The boys become best friends and fellow sufferers, but Peter, the blond, can't return the love Fee has for him.

Years go by; Fee walks through life vaguely empty, vaguely shamed, and powerfully guilty, unable to deal with the love for Peter that never found resolution, and even seeks on a couple of occasions -- though without a great deal of conviction -- to end his own life. Eventually, in his mid/late twenties, he finds someone to love and be loved by, and he takes a position teaching art at a prep school. There, however, he meets a 17-year-old blond teenager enrolled in the school who so reminds him of Peter that dormant ghosts from his past reanimate and threaten to shatter Fee's hard-won peace. To make matters even worse, he discovers that the beautiful blond boy is actually the son of the man who molested him years ago.

The story is wrenching in its power. Chee's narrative is translucent, dreamy. His prose is indirect, subtle, and suggestive rather than razor-sharp. The dreams that swirl through his narrative world are dark and interlaced with mythical motifs and archetypes from Korean folk religion, but the story never becomes completely esoteric. The sense of quiet tragedy is almost suffocating, but impossible to walk away from.

I've never read anything quite like this novel, and at first I wasn't sure if I was willing to take the dive into something so steeped in a subject that revolts me. But as I made my way through the novel, I was struck by its beauty. It's an odd thing to say about a book that tells a story of child molestation, but I was enchanted throughout. It was a dark enchantment, but it held from beginning to end.

If you can deal with its disturbing, troubling theme, I recommend this book to you. Alexander Chee is an incredible author. I'll have trouble forgetting this one. I'm not sure I like that, but I don't regret reading it.

 

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