Author Min Jin Lee, on a New York Times Book Review podcast, referred to George Eliot’s massive Victorian novel Middlemarch as “the great social novel.” Eliot’s immensely readable work can appear bloated when compared to contemporary novels, which have largely shrunk in both heft and scope, with contemporary writers often simply placing a single character’s internal life as the narrative focus. Even contemporary novels that are concerned with societal problems largely don’t depict the cast of characters of the great social realists like Dickens, Gaskell, or Eliot—instead they can seem to focus mostly onlonely heroes that reflect our lonely modern culture. By drawing on Eliot, Lee embraces an alternative vision of the social novel.
Lee’s just released American Hagwon is set over fifteen years, following a Korean family—the Kohs—and their friends between South Korea, Australia, and the United States. This latest work is much anticipated after Lee’s 2017 historical novel Pachinko, a national sensation that spawned a television adaptation and book club frenzy. Lee’s more modest 2007 book Free Food for Millionaires was profoundly affecting—more Austen than Eliot, with its humor, class-consciousness, and its gimlet eye for money. But Lee’s writing in all three books, especially Free Food and American Hagwon, is deceptively simple. Her writing is clean; sentences are brief. Lee cites Willa Cather as one of her literary heroes, and there’s much to compare in their spare prose. This approachable copy has made her a unicorn: a mass-market phenomenon in the field of literary fiction.
Like Middlemarch, American Hagwon is a social novel in the traditional sense, in that it is concerned with social issues, and also that it’s literally social in that it has a large cast of intertwined characters. As Lee says of Middlemarch, her purpose is to emulate Eliot in the important things: “love, forgiveness, failure, success.” American Hagwon is not a meditation on internal lives. It’s a story about work and education, about the inherent pleasures and pain in learning— coming to focus on the experience of the Koh family’s young adult children working at an American hagwon, a type of private tutoring center modeled after those in Korea.
Harold Bloom, deeply imperfect prophet that he was, identified the necessity of the “autonomy of the aesthetic.” This is the problem of the social novel: how does one delve into these issues without being boring? Elizabeth Gaskell’s pious martyr of North and South, Bessy Higgins, comes to mind—a failure of a character even if a successful symbol of the human cost of industrialization. Bloom, like Lee, deemed Middlemarch a masterpiece, but for him it was the triumph of the aesthetic over the ideological, instead of because of Eliot’s clear ideological concerns. What he found so compelling in the character of Dorothea, for example, is that even as she is guided by “inner light,” this closely held morality still leads her to failure, namely her marriage to Causabon. Bloom hits on something important when he discusses the loss of scope that occurs with what he calls “assigning sublimity to moral energy,” and his plaintive question to Eliot is trenchant: “Must there always be a loss in scope? Must one dwindle to a moral being?”
The primary tension here is between the demands of the ideologies of the social novel and its aesthetic, and American Hagwon bows primarily to the first, because unlike in Middlemarch, each character’s overriding morality doesn’t actually provide opportunity for real failure. The overriding but not uninteresting goodness of Lee’s characters John and Helen Koh and their three children is a panacea, one which kills the stakes of the book. The book’s intense moral compass lacks a counterbalance; in Middlemarch, there’s Eliot’sskepticism towards community structures and towards marriage, but Lee doesn’t have that.
Lee is a practicing Christian who read the Bible every day when she quit her job as an attorney to become a writer. It strikes me that the interplay between narrative, parables, and epistles that characterizes the Bible is also present in the structure of American Hagwon. There are the moral propositions of sacrifice embodied by the characters’ lived experiences—for example, the hardworking Helen who dies young but knows she will rejoin her children in the next life and the dedicated daughter Mido who eschews an elite education so she can work at the hagwon and fund her brothers’ education. And there are the moments where characters seem to address policy and ideas directly, like the untenable pressures of higher education, especially in the Korean and Korean-American communities. Lion, the founder of the American hagwon where the Koh children work, who is aptly dubbed the “Oracle of Orange County,” holds an event for the anxious parents seeking to enroll their children for college counseling in the hagwon he runs; instead of telling them how to get into college he tells them his worry about the larger system that he is admittedly benefitting from.
While the book does some subtle work to dismantle the false dream of capitalism, it still deifies hard work as intrinsically worthwhile, and perhaps no less should be expected from Lee, the granddaughter of a Presbyterian minister. It’s not just individual work ethic, it’s a joint sense of responsibility for one’s family and one’s neighbors as in Galatians 6:2: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” After the family immigrates to Southern California, erstwhile businessman John, “like a faithful ox pulling a plow,” works at a restaurant called Shrimp Castle until Helen’s sister, who married rich, comes to own a chain of nail salons in the area and employs him as the manager. Dorothea’s defense of Lydgate comes to mind: “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” The Kohs and their community have a duty towards each other but also a strong sense of self-reliance. John’s work ethic alone isn’t his savior—it’s his personal values and religious belief that elevate him. It’s his goodness. For the older characters in the book, this goodness is couched in religion, duty; for the younger ones, this goodness is those inherited family values, discipline.
And yet, regarding this goodness that is the relentless interest of this book, it must be stated that only a masterful writer could make it all still compelling. Each character is multi-faceted, distinct, and full of heart. The goodness is not one-dimensional—the motivations of each character are different; the badness of the sexy villainess, Danbi, and the weak men she ensnares, on the other hand, feels cardboard. The plot, convincingly full of human happenstance, is gripping and I found myself needing to know what would happen to the Koh family and their satellites, even if there was no mystery that they would ultimately be fine, even when facing death. Lee’s community vision is moving in this age, as is the story of an immigrant family’s journey across continents, and her sincere and spiritual faith in work.
The narrator in Middlemarch observes that “[t]he growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”; American Hagwon holds these quiet lives dear, and what Lee has created therein is a true social novel, with all its quirks.
