Review: Pachinko

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Review of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko

I love the ambition of this novel, but I don’t love the way that ambition swells a good story (or possibly good stories) into something that becomes more tedious than I could have imagined.

In other words, there’s something remarkable about a five-generation saga of Koreans living and working as second-class citizens in Japan. The historical scope is moving all by itself, and the glimpse at a history not defined by American-centered interests is refreshing.

The trouble, though, is that there’s no real center to this. Characters emerge, things happen to them, they make choices that – often as not – seem determined by what will most help the overall plot, and then they recede. I can well imagine enjoying a novel without a central main character, and that is the case here with most of the early main characters peripheral or long dead or by the end.

To pull something like that off, though, requires giving us something else, something thematic, to tie it all together. Occasionally, but too late in the novel to have the necessary effect, Lee gives us the concept of pachinko – the notion that our separate fates are shaped by a seemingly random but actually manipulated set of levers and pins – as an explanation for how lives unfold.

Outside of a few explicit conversations, we don’t really get that theme working. It’s a concept thrown in once or twice, but the rest of the novel becomes a long unspooling of our story. Worse, much of this comes in clumsy exposition: whenever we get a new character who will prove consequential, whether someone who will marry a descendant of our original characters or someone whose friendship will tie in for the next decade or so, we get a long back story delivered in fashion that would work as a Wikipedia entry. And then, when things have already begun to take on the feel of a long-running soap opera, we get the old soap opera trope of the mysterious gangster who loves – against all odds and with distant and pure love – one of our protagonists.

My wife read it at the same time as I did, and I agree with her suggestion that this would have worked much better as a series of linked short stories. That would have cut out the far-too-long expository and move-the-action-forward passages that we do get. At half its current length and with more focus on the particular dramas of the different generations of the individuals here, this could have packed real power. As it is, attenuated and digressive as this approach makes it, I can’t recommend it beyond saying that I did finish it.

I’m struck by the praise this one has gotten, and I’ll be happy to have others tell me what I’m missing. The back cover makes this sound magisterial; I agree that much. I can’t see how this got anything like serious consideration for a National Book Award, though.




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