COUNSEL CULTURE, quiet story of interiors, edges, and brutal insensititity

COUNSEL CULTURE
KIM HYE-JIN (tr. Jamie Chang)
Restless Books
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin comes the contemplative, superbly-crafted story of a woman scapegoated by sudden tragedy, and the unexpected paths she must wander in search of redemption.

Haesoo is a successful therapist and regular guest on a popular TV program. But when she makes a scripted negative comment about a public figure who later commits suicide, she finds herself ostracized by friends, fired from her job, and her marriage begins to unravel. These details come to the reader gradually, in meditative prose, through bits and pieces of letters that Haesoo writes and finally abandons as she walks alone through her city.

One day she has an unexpected encounter with Sei, a 10-year-old girl attempting to feed an orange cat. Stray cats seem to be everywhere; they have the concern of one other neighborhood woman and the ire of everyone else. Like Haesoo and Sei, the cats endure various insults and recover slowly. Haesoo, who would not otherwise care about animals or form relationships with children, now finds herself pulled back by degrees into the larger world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A respectful look at "cancel culture" and its multivarious issues. I was not fond of any of the characters, or rooting for them but also lacked animosity towards them. It was a peculiar reading experience as a result: I wanted to know what happened next but felt no frisson, no personal involvement in the story.

I don't remember a comparable sensation while reading fiction, though given the number of books I've read it statistically must have happened before.

More than anything else, Haesoo evoked from me the nostrum, "Physician, heal thyself." The entire time she is in the frame I expect there to occur another breach of empathy from or towards her. This makes the reading experience almost adversarial, but always compelling. She seems to be presented as a thoroughly ordinary person cast adrift in deeper waters than she can realistically navigate. That she swam out beyond her capability to move safely is, in the end, a completely ordinary, in fact universal, issue for humanity in general. Back in the 1970s we called it "The Peter Principle". It's been a truth of human organizational behavior since forever, no matter what trendy name one gives it: Haesoo has failed upwards to her limit of incompetence. She now reaches that interesting lagoon out of the deeper waters where storms from the outside can still reach her, but she is no longer at risk of being dragged to the bottom from which she cannot rise alive.

All of this is, however, much like real life, to be found in pauses, spaces, unfinished sentences. You aren't with Haesoo in the storm. We join her in the lagoon, a place she realizes keeps her safe but feels like a disappointment in its comparative shallowness. The waters are fresh-ish now, much having been dragged out of the space to be redeposited elsewhere. The nature of smaller spaces is, however, that they get full of junk far faster than bigger ones.

Haesoo's letters form a large part of the story. They're the way the author shows us her isolation, her growing sense of the limitations her post-cancellation will be lived within. Letters...things we create in deep isolation that are meant to be sent out to others...are both medium and message in a story like this one that focuses on the quiet parts of Trouble. Haesoo never sends her letters. Her outreach doesn't ever get completed. She focuses on a street cat and an abandoned child, determined to rescue someone as she can not rescue herself, her career, her marriage...some positive thing must come from this diminishment of her self!

It's a self very much built on her identity as a therapist. That's a job of nuances, edge cases, silences unfilled. It did not seem to me to be a job Haesoo should've done. There's a ghostly past event that explains it, I won't offer details because that calls too much attention to what's better experienced as a slow burn. The fact is that Haesoo won't be rehabilitated before your eyes, so if you're after a triumphal overcoming of obstacles story this isn't your best choice.

Read this story if your appetite is for tapas, not smorgasbord. Don't think sushi, those rarefied tastes that come directly from the sea. You're at the end of the food chain not the center. There's a little sip of sherry every so often, dry and cleansing then sweet and masking by turns. It's a case of satisfaction with the presentation, not satiation from the quantity either way.

You'll end up replete not stuffed. I found it very enjoyable. I expect y'all will too.