A Tender Age
A Novel
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- € 10,99
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From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence
“A tour de force… One of contemporary American literature’s major chroniclers of manhood.” —The Atlantic
“Moving… a classic bildungsroman.” —New York Times Book Review
"He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself." —Jhumpa Lahiri
A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.
Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Korean American narrator of Lee's striking latest (after My Year Abroad) reflects on a pivotal year of his childhood in the mid-1970s. Ten-year-old Jeon-Gi, or J-G, as he is known to his friends, is a straight-A student living happily with his parents in an apartment complex outside New York City. But after a neighbor threatens him with a ninja star, he starts carrying a knife for protection, which he winds up pulling on a classmate who picks a fight with him, sending him on a path through the juvenile justice system. Looking back in middle age, J-G considers how lucky he was to avoid jail time, which he attributes partly to his "somewhat overcourteous" demeanor and model minority race. He also remembers how the judge at his hearing, who remanded him to his parents and stipulated that he see a social worker, pulled him aside to admonish him: "Don't always think yourself to be so great." His parents, trying to be helpful, send him against his will to a Christian summer camp. His fear that he won't know how to hack it in the woods bears out in ways that are by turns farcical and tragic, and the novel concludes on a somber note, with J-G inviting the reader to ponder with him the mystery of what drove him to act out in his wayward youth. This one hits hard.
