Horrifying things have happened to the three main characters in Chang-rae Lee’s searing new novel, “The Surrendered” — things, much like the decision forced upon the heroine of William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice,” that will burn their souls and forever warp the course of their lives.
In the chaos of the Korean War, June, an 11-year-old refugee who has just lost her little sister, abandons her younger brother, whose foot has been severed by a train and lies bleeding to death, in order to save herself. June’s path will cross those of two older people, also scarred by the horrors of war: Hector, an American soldier who witnesses the torture and maiming of a Korean prisoner, who begs him to put him out of his misery; and Sylvie, a reverend’s wife, who as a girl was forced to watch the brutal torture of her parents by Japanese soldiers in Manchuria, and who will die violently at the orphanage she and her husband run in Korea.
Mr. Lee chronicles these cruel, heartbreaking events of war with harrowing, cinematic immediacy, making palpable the excruciating violence and the huge footprint it leaves on people’s lives. He not only shows us the sights and sounds of a country being torn apart by civil war, but also does an equally powerful job of conveying the emotional consequences of war — the psychological damage sustained by people, who will spend the rest of their lives trying to forget or exorcise terrible memories.
With “The Surrendered,” Mr. Lee has written the most ambitious and compelling novel of his already impressive career — a symphonic work that reprises the themes of identity, familial legacies and the imperatives of fate he has addressed in earlier works, but which he grapples with here on a broader, more intricate historical canvas. Though the novel has its flaws, it is a gripping and fiercely imagined work that burrows deep into the dark heart of war, leaving us with a choral portrait of the human capacity for both barbarism and transcendence.
In his earlier novels “Aloft” and “Native Speaker,” Mr. Lee depicted characters who were emotionally reticent, who subscribed to an isolating doctrine of estrangement and escape — partly because of temperament, partly from personal loss and fear of further hurt and partly from an immigrant’s sense of exile. The prickly characters in “The Surrendered” — selfish, tempestuous, shortsighted, but also persevering and resilient — evince a similar detachment, but in their cases it is rooted in formative events that happened to them during the war. All will seek different ways of escape: Sylvie in drugs, Hector in drink, June in dogged work.
A canny pragmatist who has always put survival before all else, June was able to get herself to America after the war, and she built a profitable antiques business in New York. Now middle-aged, she has stomach cancer, and before she dies she is determined to find her estranged son, Nicholas — who has never returned from a trip he took to Europe. June’s search for Nicholas will also lead her on a search for Nicholas’s father, Hector, who has settled into a grim, hand-to-mouth existence as a janitor at a mini-mall in New Jersey. Both June and Hector, we learn, are haunted by their grim memories of the Korean War, and also by their love for Sylvie, in whose awful death both played a part.
By cutting back and forth in time, Mr. Lee turns June and Hector’s quest to come to terms with their past into a kind of detective story for the reader. As we are given out-of-sequence, strobelike glimpses of them during the war in Korea and later at home in America, we slowly piece together the narrative of their lives — and the guilty secrets they have kept hidden for so many years. We slowly acquire an understanding of how the war has shaped them, their relationships and their families. At the same time we are given hints of what their lives might have been like had war and the madness of history not intervened — alternate lives in which Hector stayed in the small working-class town where he was born in upstate New York, June grew up in Korea with her parents and siblings, and Sylvie returned to the United States before Japanese soldiers commandeered her parents’ mission school.
If the reader stops and thinks about it, there are lots of infelicities of craft in this novel. June’s relationship with her son remains decidedly sketchy, as are the circumstances of her and Hector’s parting so many decades ago. Hector, with his mythic name and his almost surreal imperviousness to injury and physical pain, sometimes feels more like a symbol than a human being, and the deaths that pile up around him — including those of his father and several girlfriends — can feel contrived, like the self-conscious manipulations of an author intent on exploring the equation of fate and free will. But Mr. Lee writes with such intimate knowledge of his characters’ inner lives and such an understanding of the echoing fallout of war that most readers won’t pause to consider such lapses — they will be swept up in the power of “The Surrendered” and its characters’ aching and indelible stories.
