Deriving Meaning (If Any) From Madness

Though there isn’t much in the way of comedy, the title’s understatement, The Vegetarian, made me chuckle as I read on. It belongs to the international breakthrough novel by recent Nobel Prize-winner Han Kang (2007), translated into English by Deborah Smith (2015). When Yeong-hye turns herbivore, it isn’t a mere lifestyle change, initiated after a period of reflection and planning, explained lucidly to anyone curious, and undertaken with care for those affected, namely her husband. She does so without warning and starts casually violating basic social norms, too, with strange, unruly, alienating behavior that upends her home life overnight.

It’s up to the reader to decide if that’s the mission objective or not. But, without a doubt, there’s a good reason it might be. Her husband tells us he settled on her because she’s unexceptional, an ordinary woman who would dutifully play her role in creating his ideal ordinary life. He found her a touch strange before her conversion: she reserved some of her free time for reading. No uxoriousness, no loyalty. Not a man who ever tried to understand his wife. And certainly not one to support her decision and try his best to adjust to the change. It’s more than inconvenient. It’s embarrassing, unthinkable. His life is ruined. Another uptight, dimwitted policeman of normality who eventually turns into a domestic abuser. As his section continued, I observed that this would largely define him and had the kneejerk thought: Kang forgets the novelist’s duty to look closer and find the depths beneath the boorishness and violence. Then: This is too naturalistic to be satire. He’s one of those who have no hidden depths to uncover, what you see is unfortunately what you get. Kang doesn’t refuse to see his humanity, just sensibly limits herself to showing no more than scraps of it.

I wasn’t sure this man could carry a novel and he doesn’t, Kang shifting with ease to a character who appears briefly in the first section, where a passing belittling remark signals a sharp contrast: He’s an artist. The novel shifts one more time. This last section slows down somewhat but, on the whole, two of the novel’s strengths are its propulsion and sturdiness of form. A third strength: a measure of weirdness, though not of the Kafka or Murakami sort, two almost entirely different writers mentioned among the blurbs. It achieves this with sentences that are at best transparent. Raymond Carver’s advice: if it’s quotable, cut it. The substance of the writing can be conveyed to the reader without the pleasure of gnawing on choice sentences and getting sauce on your face. One of the more memorable (and little quoted) pieces of writing advice, though sometimes I think: depending on one’s interpretation, avoiding the “quotable” can suggest a certain lack of precision, even carelessness. This doesn’t accurately describe Carver, who provides some of the best evidence for his own writerly wisdom. It is with Kang, however, at least in this English version. The nightmare husband of the first section, basically a functional illiterate, somehow knows the word “philtrum,” which I had to look up, thinking the entire time that this paste snorter would never force me to do this. (It’s that wee indentation in the middle of the upper lip.) From there I knew more was to come: “An amount of time passed that would be impossible to measure.” “She just giggled into the air.” Vocal sounds during sex are for “flirtatious women.” Repeated use of a puzzling and rather demotic image, someone “quietly smiling.” Cover your ears: the boombox of my smile is turned up to 11 right now.

To avoid the quotable is to become unintentionally quotable. (And to pursue the quotable is to become unintentionally quotable.)

The artist’s wife, In-hye, is the Vegetarian’s sister. To the Vegetarian’s husband, she’s the perfect woman, managing the home while working full-time, always conducting herself with the utmost propriety. Even so, the artist finds himself drawn to the Vegetarian. As for his wife: “She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.” It’s as if Kang asks: so how is a woman supposed to win in this society? A fourth strength: her social commentary—on work, marriage, family, medicine—singes.

The Vegetarian fizzles out at the very end. It’s overpraised and yet I can see how it would pique some interest in Kang’s other works.