American cover, top; British edition, below. I prefer the British one.
Y/N
by Esther Li
Penguin Random House, 2024
[ #23 Out of the park on first at-bat: A debut ]
Update on Authors Watercooler Reading Challenge 2024. I wasn’t getting anywhere with my paranormal pick, The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Welles. Who, unknown to me when I picked it in January, also wrote the Murderbot series. But, the truth is, I had to drop it for something else. Which is odd because it’s normally the type of fantasy novel I like: a alternate-world Europe (specifically, France), lots of interesting characters, magic and sorcerers, a revenge plot. I enjoyed the writing style. But I also didn’t have the time or inclination to sink into it. It was missing something for me… passion, maybe? A dash of shameless bad taste?
So, my new pick comes from a different category, #22 Out of the park on first at-bat: Y/N, by Esther Li. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while and it came up in my library availability list. It’s about a woman who becomes obsessed with a Korean Boy Band member and promised meta commentary on fanfics, Y/N fanfics, and Korean boy bands. In my world a guaranteed recipe for success.
First, some explanation. Y/N refers to a category of fanfics that seeks to immerse the reader directly into the action by featuring them as a character in the story. Since everyone’s names are different, they are referred to by Y/N — your name — throughout. For example,
“All I’m saying is it would be nice if you joined us for dinner!” Y/N slapped the kitchen counter with the tea towel in her hand.
Sometimes first person POV is used:
“Just call me Y/n. Have you heard anything about the rest of us? Are they here too?” I asked a sliver of hope creeping in.
Related to Y/N fics are ones written in second person POV, addressed to the reader who is one of the main characters.
Your train of thought dissipates when he uses his other hand to grab your chin, pulling you closer. He waits a few seconds, contemplating, he whispers an “I know this is wrong.. but,” then he kisses you.
I have to say I find this style more than a little too intimate and creepy. Sometimes it’s combined with the use of Y/N making it another variant.
However, the book didn’t go as juicily into the concept as I had hoped, not in the way Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl both skewered and paid homage to Harry Potter fandom. Li’s Y/N is literary, not popular, fiction. By that I mean not a lot happens, what does happen is obscure, and every other sentence is crafted to be a mini-masterpiece of the English language. No one talks like they would in real life. If this sounds like I’m making fun of it, yeah, well, I am, but I also enjoyed it a lot and read it straight through over three days. (The book being pretty short helped.) If I hadn’t borrowed it from the library, I’d keep it around to read again at some point.
The book is also a pointed, yet good-natured satire of both fandom and Korean boy bands, a satire that sometimes sounds like wish fulfillment on the author’s part. How else could one explain a Korean Boy Band with singers named after celestial bodies, a mirrored pyramid-palace for them to live in, and a middle-aged female manager known as The Music Professor? Just by all that the book enters magic realism territory.
The plot begins with a day in the life of the unnamed narrator, a Korean-American woman pushing 30 who lives in Berlin, doing translations and copywriting for an avocado importer, a touch of crazy humor. As a person, she’s a blank: very self-aware, yet surrounded by a dull anomie she can’t shake off. Even her boyfriend inspires no passion; she might be a depressed and a bit autistic. One night a friend drags her along to the Korean boy band that figures in the book. She starts off sneering, then inner fireworks go off and she develops a massive crush on Moon, one of the members, to the detriment of everything else in her life. But Yi doesn’t describe this the way you would think. The first person narrator holds her emotions at bay, seeking cynicism and detachment, yet flies off into abstract poetry when she describes the teenage Moon and the effect he has on her. Which is not normal love, or normal lust. It’s the fevered drive to immerse herself in something greater and beyond human experience, to wring every drop out of it she can. To this end she starts by writing a Y/N novel on a fanfic site called Archimage, a cleverly named nod to Archive of Our Own. It’s a reflection of her own experience, but fictionalized. She reads others’ fanfic as well.
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Frankly, most of the stories were unreadable. After all, the authors weren’t writers, but fans who had turned to language as a last resort. I could feel the frustration mounting as the prose grew ever more sodden, as the author submitted to yet another cliche, hoping their strange feelings would foment, coherently limbed, out of the primordial soup of failing story. But I preferred these stories to most contemporary novels, which mirrored the pieties of the day with absolute ardor. |  |
That’s as precise a description of fanfic as any and also serves to highlight the language of the novel, which reads like it was originally written in Korean and translated, with all the oddball word choices intact. But it wasn’t.
This was all amusing but when Moon suddenly leaves the boy group and disappears, the narrator is thrown into turmoil and resolves to find him. So begins her quest, starting with a flight to Korea, both his and her homeland.
Because this is a magic realism world, characters conveniently appear there who guide her on her journey: a group of superfans who meet at the cafe where Moon once ate; a cryptic shoemaker she meets on the street who becomes her helpmate, the all-powerful Music Professor herself. They all help her Just Because in spite of her sour, charmless attitude. But OTOH none of this intended to be realistic, just mystical. At times the writing style, and themes of fame and seclusion from fame in a fantastic building, reminded me of Angela Carter’s gender-bending SF/magic realism novel The Passion of New Eve, and I wish Yi had some of her clarity and restraint of prose. But even so, I enjoyed the journey. It was a wild ride.
Near the end the narrator corners her quarry and meets him at last, but fails, somehow, to connect. At least, I think she does; it wasn’t clear. The symbolism of their place of meeting implies to me that once the narrator sees Moon as a human being doomed to decay her obsession vanishes. The novel leaves off in a place of confusion.
Which I wished it hadn’t. Surely something had changed or been revealed? But I’m not sorry I read it.
