FICTION IN REVIEW

1 5 3 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W D A V I D G A L E F If the task of the novelist is to imagine individuals’ lives, how does one write about a whole country? Nadine Gordimer and South Africa come to mind, as does John Dos Passos and his U.S.A. trilogy. The accretion of detail and incident work through synecdoche : one loom worker equals a factory; a hate crime can signify a racist society. But what about a place like North Korea, a nation whose government seems to stamp out the personality of its populace through physical brutality and starvation, where propaganda and labor camps are the rule rather than the exception? How does an individual function, what kind of plot can arise, amid such systemic derangement? That’s the task Adam Johnson sets for himself in his new novel, The Orphan Master’s Son. Listen to this loudspeaker: In local news, our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il was seen o√ering on-the-spot guidance to the engineers deepening the TaeT h e O r p h a n M a s t e r ’ s S o n , by Adam Johnson (Random House, 480 pp., $26.00 cloth, $15.00 paper) 1 5 4 G A L E F Y dong River channel. While the Dear Leader lectured to the dredge operators, many doves were seen to spontaneously flock above him, hovering to provide our Reverend General some much needed shade on a hot day. Also to report is a request from Pyongyang’s Minister of Public Safety, who asks that while pigeon-snaring season is in full swing, trip wires and snatch loops be placed out of reach of our youngest comrades. And don’t forget, citizens: the ban on stargazing is still in e√ect. This is the voice of o≈cialdom, of socialistic boosterism that conceals any bad news under a radiant haze of misinformation. It is also a feat of ventriloquism by Johnson, who showed in his apocalyptic first novel, Parasites Like Us, just where our species is headed. His short-story collection, Emporium, presented eight views of an American society pushed only slightly into the future, but refracting a deadpan amorality as a sinister norm: a teen sniper working for the LAPD; a girl who talks matter-of-factly of ‘‘muscly ATF agents with black cargo pants, lean haircuts, and tough-luck smiles.’’ Besides a frighteningly impressive technical vocabulary, Johnson’s fiction exhibits the crisp reality of a snapshot, Photoshopped to distorted perfection. It combines elements of George Orwell and George Saunders, though Johnson has his own style, fusing lyricism with the precision and damage-inflicting capabilities of an AK-47. It’s 60 percent satire, 40 percent prophecy. The Orphan Master’s Son, Johnson’s second novel, embodies a large vision: an extended view into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose very name is a type of propaganda. In the DPRK, nothing is what it seems, starting with the orphan master’s son, who’s not an orphan, as he insists to anyone who will listen. Growing up in an orphanage called Long Tomorrows, his father distant, his mother a photograph, the boy known as Pak Jun Do lives through a nationwide famine only by being packed o√ to the army at age fourteen. There he becomes an expert in ‘‘zero-light combat’’ from his training in the invasion tunnels that go under the DMZ to South Korea. Thereafter, Jun Do, who’s not quite a John Doe, pursues a checkered career. The army sends him on missions to kidnap Japanese civilians and bring them back to North Korean labor camps. The F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W 1 5 5 R government enrolls him in language school, after which he’s assigned to a fishing trawler to listen in on international radio transmissions . (This is the only section in the novel that drags a bit.) During this period, a U.S. crew boards the vessel, Jun Do gets bitten by a shark, and...