My Amazon and Goodreads review of My Year Abroad: A Novel by Chang-Rae Lee (Rating 3) – Bifurcated, Half Good. My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee, is the story of a year in the life of Tiller Bardmon, a twenty-year-old, motherless, one-eighth Asian, upper middle class dropout from a New Jersey college town. In this bifurcated tale, part of Tiller’s year is spent living semi-anonymously with an older woman who is in a witness protection program and has a young son. The unlikely threesome form a quasi-family, and Tiller becomes a father figure to the boy, who possesses an uncanny talent for cooking. Tiller has spent the earlier part of the year in China, taken there by a wealthy Asian-American businessman, who is both mentor and father figure. His adventures abroad range from exotic to kinky to torturous. “Adventures” implies an exciting journey for the reader, but Lee’s overlong and fanciful descriptions of bizarre figures and unbelievable events were boring. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I found the author’s riffs to be self-indulgent. By contrast, Tiller’s tame domesticity, in the company of fully drawn characters, especially the young boy, was moving and engaging. A better book would have truncated the unconventional experiences abroad and remained stateside, delving deeper into the creation of an unconventional family.
