Time will tell as to whether
or not Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son will
go the way of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and make him a
celebrity, or Paul Harding’s Tinkers and leave the author right where he
started as merely a cult author. But for me personally, I think it will go the
way of the latter, because it is a bit too dense for mass appeal, and even
though some scenes are packed to the gills with blood and guts, it never really
gets interesting beyond the confusing plotline with little in the way of
guideposts to let the reader know about timelines and who is telling us the
story. In that way, it feels like a more complex but similar book to something
that writer Chris Adrian would publish, both Adrian and Johnson being writers
writers who value originality over coherence, A. The novel is told in two
different parts using three different narrators. When the book begins, we meet
Jun Do, a not-quite orphan in an orphanage (his father runs the place and his
mom is dead) in a dystopian version of modern South Korea. As he grows up, he
becomes kidnapper for the police state, and in doing so, falls in love with the
legendary and elusive Sun Moon, an actress who is married to the great
Commander Ga, who is an intense rival to dictator Kim Jon Il. It gets rather
confusing, with fake identities and an American woman sailing around the world
in a small boat, making me wish that Johnson had at least put a character list
at the beginning, which I think is fair. It’s very elusive and idiosyncratic at
times, but there is great talent here, enough to make me want to read the next
book by Johnson, as long as he has control over his subject.
Rating: 3/5
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