Yep, that's just about right: "Erl King" by Julia Elliott

Probably everyone has known a cradle-robbing older man who dated a younger woman at some point. I have a couple of male professor friends, and they run from even the hint of flirting with younger female students, largely because they don't want to be "that guy." Because as generally disreputable a cliche as it is to be an older man dating a younger woman--especially one within shouting distance of the legal age of consent--the worst cliche of all is probably the older male professor going for the pretty young student seeking knowledge before she's worldly-wise enough to know better. 

I've long wondered what makes men do this. One of the short stories in my book, "Dawn Doesn't Disappoint," is about a man who takes up with a much younger woman, partly because I wanted to try to wrap my ahead around what makes a guy want to take up with someone much younger. But maybe it's not that hard to understand. "But youth looks good on everyone," my main character concluded after a list of his young girlfriend's flaws, and maybe that's all there is to it. It's hard for me to understand wanting a relationship where companionship is going to be difficult because of a lack of shared experiences and understanding, but maybe I'm overthinking it, at least for the men for whom that's not a priority. 

The more difficult question, then, is why a young woman takes up with men like this. That's what "Erl King" by Julia Elliott examines. Much like my short story, the motivation can possibly be wrapped up in one phrase uttered by a character from the story: "suspension of disbelief." 

The narrator, whose name we do not learn, because everyone only calls her pet names, has been raised like many young women. She's been surrounded by a cheap version of Romanticism, fed stories of princesses and castles, and her father has tried to keep her safe in her own home like it was a castle to keep her from her prince. When the narrator calls home at one point and hears her father in the background cutting down the weeds and wild vines growing up around the house, she recalls asking him as a child to let them grow. Why? So their house could "be like Sleeping Beauty's castle." The narrator grew up under a certain mythology in which fathers see themselves charged, like knights, with protecting the chastity of their daughters from would-be suitors. 

While fathers think they're doing their daughters a favor, they're likely doing more to build up the romantic ideas of girls surrounded by myths of men coming to rescue them. The girls turn into young women programmed to look for a man to open the mysteries of the world to them. That's where the narrator and her three roommates, students at University of South Carolina, are at the beginning of the story. They take a break from their lives at home together to go to a party in the woods hosted by "The Wild Professor," who doesn't really even try to hide from his reputation. The young women are drawn to the party by "mutual longing."

I appreciate it when people self-identify as stupid on their shirts, so I don't have to spend the time to find out.

Allusion storm

The story is dripping with literary allusions. I'm sure an enterprising literature student somewhere will follow the trail of allusions one day, but I'd like to avoid spending the next month of my life doing something that will only bore most readers. A great deal of the allusions are satirical. Many of the things said are pure nonsense, starting with the first words the narrator hears "theory guru" Dr. Glott say to the Wild Professor when she shows up at his house. 

The short explanation of the significance of the allusions is that our young narrator has been brought up surrounded by romantic notions of men that make her susceptible to the Wild Professor's bullshit. Many of the references are to British Romanticism or the Germanic legends that fed Romanticism. (Karen Carlson did some really nice sleuthing of the first allusion encountered in the story here.) This works to sway the narrator in two ways. First, she's a literature student, and she's interested in learning more about what all the literature in the world means. The professor, she thinks, can help her to learn faster. "My ignorance was as deep as a wishing well, and the Wild Professor tossed glittering coins of knowledge into it." 

Secondly, she's been conditioned to think of men Byronically. That is, women are to pity the suffering of the brilliant man who suffers for his brilliance. The Wild Professor is wild literally, as he morphs sometimes into a wild animal. This is the form he takes when he has sex with the narrator. The narrator can occasionally see through his transformations and view him in his real form, which is old and decrepit, but her "willing suspension of disbelief" usually wins out, and the old man transforms again. As a wild animal, he is something to marvel at and perhaps care for. She's basically Bella in the Twilight saga. Or any woman suffering with a drunk who says he wants to write the great American screenplay. All of this works to the Wild Professor's advantage when it comes to keeping her from leaving him. 

The girl grows up

Our narrator inevitably outgrows the professor. The reason she took up with him in the first place was because it seemed he had a lot to teach her. And maybe he did, for a while. Since then, though, she's learned to transform herself, although she's done it largely by ignoring the way he does things and striking out on her own. The professor makes fun of her learning, but it seems to work. As she starts to outgrow him, the Wild Professor shows his true colors by starting to court someone even younger: the fourteen-year-old daughter of a philosophy professor. That's the moment the narrator knows she needs to leave, and she runs away with the young girl and her roommates in a White Rabbit (the car, not an actual white rabbit, although the image of the Wild Professor chasing a white rabbit is intentionally meant to make the reader think of every god chasing a wild maiden who then changes into an animal in various mythology systems). 

Elliott got two stories into 2019 best-of anthologies. The other was "Hellion," which I loved. This story spent more time in the magical world and less in the real world than "Hellion" did, and maybe for this reason, it didn't feel as poignant to me. But that's not the point of the story. It's satire, and satire isn't usually aimed at making the reader cry from emotional catharsis. 

What this story does, it does well. Like a good satirical article from The Onion or McSweeney's, the reader kind of gets the joke early on and has a sense of what's coming from the opening. The story then commits to the joke, goes a little overboard with it, delighting the reader with excess, then ends the bit just as it's about to wear thin. What makes the story special isn't that it gives a new understanding to these May-December romances, but that it is so good at taking what is the obvious but probably correct understanding of them and finding a perfect vehicle to express it. After finishing this story, the reader will think, "Yeah, that's exactly what these relationships are about," and maybe be unable to ever think of them again without recalling this story.  

Stealing rather than making something: "The History of Sound" by Ben Shattuck

Early on in "The History of Sound" by Ben Shattuck, we learn that Lionel, the narrator, has perfect musical pitch and that he sees and even tastes sound. He can't not know what note a cough is, or what key a waterfall's roar is in. Which is why he doesn't really feel like the music he sings is his, even though he's such a excellent singer, he's enrolled in an elite conservatory in Boston. He confesses that, "I've always felt as if what came from my throat and lips was not mine, like I was stealing rather than making something." Rather than the music coming from inside him, it seems to Lionel like the music is just lying around freely all over creation, and he's picking it up. It's hard for Lionel to understand that everyone doesn't hear music like him, so it feels like he's taking what ought to be common property.

It's appropriate for our thieving narrator, then, that he takes a job one summer as a musical ethnographer, roaming Maine to collect folk songs. It's a field that often takes criticism for stealing, using the word we often use for the kind of intellectual theft that's too general to result in a copyright infringement case: appropriation. While ethnomusicologists themselves believe their work helps to further human knowledge and to preserve the traditions of communities, some see their work as stealing and benefiting from the theft, as the ethnographers are often the ones paid for what they find, not those from whom they learn about the folk music.

Lionel is, perhaps, exactly the kind of person who might be guilty of this kind of profiteering. He tends to be distracted by whatever shiny object he sees. As a child, his parents were often vexed by how easily he forgot about objects he was responsible for, or even gave them away without thinking. He calls himself a "magpie" at one point, and describes the Baroque music he fell in love with at the conservatory "a coldly glittering piece of jewelry," the kind of shining bauble that would catch the attention of the easily distracted. He's the sort of person who might care about folk songs while he's collecting them, but then forgets afterwards, especially about the people. And he did, as a mater of fact, benefit commercially from writing musical ethnographies in the 50s, decades after his work in Maine.

It's no wonder the one scene we get of Lionel and his partner interacting with a local shows them completely missing the tragedy the man they're interviewing has gone through, and also the man mistrusting them. The man might be right to do so.

Lionel's fickle personality is likely the reason he's never had a long-lasting relationship in his life. The only time he's really been in love was with David, the young man with whom he went on his music cataloging trip in 1919, right after David returned from the war. (Lionel did not go because of his poor eyesight.) Lionel had already met David earlier at the conservatory, and they had a brief affair before the war, so when David wrote to Lionel asking Lionel to join him for the trip, sponsored by David's college, Lionel left his mother's farm immediately, not caring that all the fruit on the trees would rot, because when Lionel is distracted by something, he tends not to care about the costs, and he traveled to Maine to be with David.

The two have a brief idyll together, full of sex and blueberries and naked swimming in waterfalls. Lionel, who ends up being bi-sexual in his relationships in his life, doesn't feel any guilt about being with David, the way some people might have back then, But it's maybe not a lack of guilt to be admired. Just as Lionel simply hears music, he simply doesn't feel guilt. It's just not in him. It's one thing to own who you are in spite of what society tries to tell you, but to be unable to feel guilt at all seems nearly pathological. And probably not a great qualification for someone who will be entrusted with handling the cultural treasures of others responsibly.

It turns out that David made up the whole trip. He lied when he told Lionel that Bowdoin College had commissioned their study. And David was actually engaged to a woman while on the trip with Lionel. David, seemingly mentally scarred from the war, dies a few months after the end of his music cataloging trip with Lionel, one presumes from suicide. Lionel moves on to his life of short-term relationships and making use of his incredible voice. When his voice gives out on him decades later, he takes to writing, which is how someone eventually finds him and returns to him the wax recordings of songs he and David made that summer. They were sitting in an attic.

The story itself somewhat resembles its narrator. It has musical ability, but the music seems to simply be plucked from the environment, not coming from any white-hot interior. I realize it takes more than belly fire if you want to be the next Baryshnikov, but there ought to be some belly fire in the story. Instead, in spite of its technical mastery, the story feels assembled from what was lying around.

It's not just that there was a movie twenty years ago about a musical ethnographer (Songcatcher). Nor is it just because "A History of ____" is a ubiquitous title formula. (In fact, A Something of Something is a fairly well-worn title formula.) It's not like making one story about a thing means nobody can ever make stories about that thing again, or else who would ever write about anything? It's that this story seems to keep an emotional distance from its own heart.

There are many attempts to bridge this gap by way of lyrical passages:

"Thinking of it now reminds me of the summer's white moths flitting around the lantern on our porch in Kentucky, of my brother and me lying on our backs, hands on our stomachs, feeling the vibration as Dad's foot stomped out the slow rhythm--the scratch of his boot on the wood. Katydids in the trees, stitching the night together."

Or

"Of all the recordings that summer of 1917, I felt like we were missing the best sounds. I wanted an audio journal of the days between our work sessions. The sound of a windstorm coming up a valley. The sound of the pines’ broomed limbs brushing overhead. The kapock-kipp-koopof eight children’s wooden spoons hitting wooden plates down a table south of Augusta; the crackling lard around a side of meat burning in a skillet. I wanted to record David’s whispering, “Holy Jesus,” when we first came to a field glowing with fireflies in Dog Hill; the scrape of a snapping turtle’s claws across a table in Lincoln; the preamble in Cowper, when Nora Tettle and her three daughters, each so eager to have their songs recorded, singing at once entirely separate songs, each Tettle trying to outdo the others until David had to quiet them by knocking two cooking pans together. Love Williams in Southwick, seated in the middle of her kitchen, singing a modal tune while I tried to fix the phonograph, her six children and five stepchildren all sitting around her, quiet, until Love came to the second refrain, when the children couldn’t restrain themselves and one by one joined their mother. Twelve singers, four harmonies."

There's music here, but somehow it feels like the music is just being collected, not welling up from inside the soul of the story. I didn't feel a real gut-punch from any of this. It felt like music well played by a competent musician who was playing because it was his job to play, and the next night, he'd pack up and go play somewhere else. Or more to the point, it felt like a story a writer wrote in the way stories are supposed to be written because he writes stories for a living, not because he would just bust if he didn't tell it.

Maybe the story succeeds too much at reflecting its own narrator's interior life, at stealing music rather than creating it, at having difficulty emotionally connecting with the world until it's too late. Lionel's grandfather muses at one point that "happiness isn't a story," and maybe this story is just working out that hypothesis throughout. Determining whether the story succeeds might be like an assessment of a story with a bleak worldview in which the story mirrors theme by being painful to get through. Is it a success when a story is painful to read, if it's about how life is also painful to get through?

This story is in that nebulous territory for me. It's about the dangers of treating beauty without respect, and in the process, the story feels to me like it flirts with treating itself too cynically. Or maybe too sincerely, which, in spite of being the opposite, ends up feeling like much the same thing. I can see why it was considered strong enough to be in a best-of collection, but for me, the story felt a little like Baroque music: a lot of head but not enough heart.
-------------

Karen Carlson, The Blogger Laureate of Maine, was a lot more certain than I was that she liked this story. Her take on it is over here.

Before you go off to look for America, America comes looking for you: "In the Arms of Saturday Night" by Cally Fiedorek

In the opening lines of Cally Fiedorek's "The Arms of Saturday Night," the main character, Janie, is almost literally doing what that narrator of Simon And Garfunkel's "America" is doing at one point: counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. Or at least she's counting the lack of cars she hopes she'll find there: "There'd be no traffic on the turnpike, not on Saturday. She could get her dad to drive her to the city, though at the risk of being pushy, and insensitive, really, considering the circumstances..."

The circumstances are that her dad's younger brother Murray has died, and her parents are hosting the post-funeral reception is at their house. Janie is sixteen and full of "the death-proof, scrappy ways of teenage lust." Like in the Simon and Garfunkel song, she feels the need to get on the road to go look for America, or the promise of America. It's not a road trip like Kerouac took, because she only wants to go from Jersey into the city, but she's itching for a journey nonetheless, one that will give her "some relief from the dull mortal ache of always being where the party wasn't."

Janie's fascination with Adam is entirely focused around his penis. She is almost unable to comprehend that every time she has ever conversed with Adam at school, his penis was only inches away from her. "An organ of such agonizing mystery, and he just walked around with it, like it was keys." Like it was keys, indeed, because Janie sees sex with Adam as the event that will unlock the door to escape her sense of ennui, of not belonging. "What she wanted was the ticked box, the existential check-in."

Hers is a very middle-class, American sense of ennui. She's wedged between the rich, who are "tacky, maybe, but life-loving," and the poor, for whom every day in America is like "a punch in the face." But at least these poor have something her squeezed-and-getting-more-squeezed middle class family doesn't: identity. (And here, the narrator unleashes some of her wryest barbs in describing the identity-less middle class: "They listened to NPR, sometimes, but their hearts weren't in it. They had no unifying piety, to God, or sport, or any of their many motherlands.")

Road trips might be even more American than baseball. 

So Janie's family is getting by, but not really loving it. Her father's taking it harder than her mother. Her mother has more of an old-school, "get on with things" attitude, while her father is a failing academic, one whose "career as a public intellectual had been looking, in the past year, pretty private." Janie isn't without love for her parents, some of which she actually feels the need to supress, but a strong sense of her place in the world isn't really her birthright. That's what she is looking for out on the American road, a road that leads into Adam's pants.

Aside from the Genesis connotations of the name Adam, whom Janey hopes will be her first man (I think I've used the name Adam twice in stories for the same reasons), Adam holds another meaning for her: he's about to go out on the road for real. He is going to have a Kerouac-like across-America journey, because he's headed to California soon. Janey imagines he will find some kind of Beatnik enlightenment: "She could picture them all, a week from now, in some Tonto-esque headwear, ensconced in their cocktails of peyote and electrolyte water, boning models in truck beds in the craters of the desert. Communing, amid nightblooms, with the very source of life, and he could say, years down the road, I was there. I touched the face of true experience. I, Adam Donovan, touched down in the cradle of the land."

Before Janie can go look for America, though, it comes to find her

As she's trying to figure out how to get her parents to take her to the party Adam will be at in the city even though it's her uncle's funeral, the mourners enter her house. They have peculiarly historic American surnames: Jackson and Wright and Farragut. After this first group arrives come the biker friends of Uncle Murray. As in, motorcycle friends. As in, big, scary-looking, rough-around-the-edges bikers.

The romance of the road has come to Janie! America has come to Janie, because what could be more American than a group of Easy Riders, who revel in the freedom of the American road?

It stirs Janie's longing for freedom even further. "...tonight, she and Adam would be out there, free, free to smoke and drink and spit and misbehave, and love each other."

Her mother initially strongly rebuffs her plans, but Janie sticks to her guns and finds, to her surprise, that her parents just aren't that willing to fight her anymore. They'll be disappointed, but they can't keep her locked in the house. She's almost sorry there isn't the big donnybrook she'd prepared for.

You want it to be one thing, but it's another**

So here I was at this point, thinking this story was a really trenchant examination of the emptiness and anxiety of white, middle class lives, something like reading Jonathan Franzen, but with a more believable female psyche. (Although the fascination with the dick could easily show up in a Franzen female.) But that's not what it was. 

Last year's Pushcart Prize anthology featured five consecutive coming-of-age stories at one point. So maybe I should have been prepared for this story to switch gears and become one, too. 

Well, it wasn't that sudden a gear change. There were some signs it was coming. Janie is incredulous thinking of the photo of her father at 18, himself in a motorcycle gang, because the man she knows as her father is a "cautious" man. This realization that the people she knows used to be something else is itself preparing her to change. 

The big change for Janie comes when she decides to flirt with a young man at the funeral before she leaves for her party. It's low stakes, so she has nothing to lose, and it'll be good practice. The young man is a little rough around the edges--doesn't have much going on, it seems, and he defends Uncle Murray's love of conspiracy theories by saying it was just Murray's "way of being curious." The kid's not without his own pithy insights, though, and he and Janie both agree that life is "flat." 

But the big secret is that it turns out the guy she's flirting with was the secret son of her uncle, making him her cousin. 

Her cousin has used a genetics tracing service to find his father, which, it turns out, was Murray. The kid's gone on a voyage of discovery, and the search actually brought him answers. It turns out Janie's parents have recently gone to Ellis Island, that most iconic of American sites, to research their own genealogy, and Janie's knowledge of what they found allows her to confirm the young man's story. The study of ancestry seemed like a good place to look for these people who lack identity, but for Alan, the young man, finding his father didn't really give him everything he was looking for. 

And this is Janie's wake-up moment. She realizes she's been "running the clock out for some grand encounter." She wonders what will happen if it doesn't come, then suddenly realizes the far worse scenario: "...what if it did? Wasn't that worse?" Of course, she realizes, the answer isn't in Adam's magic penis or some other bit of youthful discovery.

Having spent the last hour trying to get drunk or high to ready herself for her big night, we see her at the story's close trying to sober up. She's skipping past the need to make a long string of young people mistakes in order to wise up. She's wise already. 

But the story doesn't just end on that note. It's not a heavy message of the superiority of sober choices over drunk hopefulness. In the last sentence, Janie is smelling the summer air, and thinks that "it made you pity the dead even more than usual." That's kind of a carpe diem sentiment. 

The story's heart isn't really either fully with the freedom to make possibly unwise choices or the wisdom to refrain from them. It's with intentional life, one grounded in knowing who you are. I've thought a lot about whether one could make an argument that identity is the best source of ethics. I'm still not sure that makes total sense, but I do leave this story thinking the cure to what is ailing Janie might be at the party she's leaving rather than the one she's going to. 

-------

For Karen Carlson's take on this story, which picks up on the ambivalence toward adventure by zeroing in on the multiples connotations of "arms," go here. 

**Marlo Stanfield, The Wire

The North Korean novel "Friend" by Paek Nam Ryong is a lot like an 80's American family drama

Would it surprise anyone if I said that a North Korean novel skirts a bit with falling into propaganda? Probably not, but in spite of the extreme limitations of its culture on artistic freedom, the novel "Friend" (벗) by Paek Nam Ryong is full of surprises. Reading it, I was reminded of the opening scenes of the 1976 Argentinian novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, when Molina is recounting films he likes to his cellmate Valentin as a way to kill time. Molina likes a Nazi propaganda film, one that in many ways resembles the work of Leni Riefenstahl. Valentin is appalled by this, but Molina, who is in prison because as a transgender woman she is seen as a corrupter of public morals, believes that beauty is beauty, and it doesn't become less so because the creator of the beauty is using the only opportunity society offers her to make it. Molina didn't use these words, but there is a sense in which beauty, in a society that surrounds us with ugliness, is transgressive.

Transgressiveness is a term that gets kicked around in art a lot. It just means art which violates the mores or sensibilities of the culture likely to consume it. We're so used to transgressive works in the West now that it's difficult for some artists to even figure out how to shock anymore. But it's not like that in some societies. The list of societies where one doesn't just go around shocking sensibilities would have North Korea at the top of it.

So it's surprising that Paek's novel, published in 1988 (and recently translated into English, which is how I heard of it, although I read the Korean version, not the translation), manages, in fact, to transgress. Its transgressions are like those of Molina's fictional Nazi film: they aren't open transgressions, but rather they exploit the very ideals the society professes to believe to be noble in order, by juxtaposition with reality, to highlight how that society is not meeting its own ideals. Beauty stands out among ugliness.

The title of the novel, translated "friend," is pronounced "Butt," which always makes me giggle. 

If the novel really does include transgressions mixed in with its generally pliant, pro-government, pro-party, pro-socialism exterior, it's a funny kind of transgression. It's to be expected, I suppose, that a novel from a society like no other would produce novels like no other, including the transgressive parts of those novels. South Korean writer Jeong Do-sang, in his analysis of the Friend, commented on the uniqueness of the book as its most salient characteristic:

"The North Korean novel had not been influenced at all in its development by Russia or China, much less Europe, and has become a truly unique colloquial novel. South Korean novels are greatly influenced by the Japanese auto-biographical novel or French novels, even while it could be said they still maintain their own particular qualities. By contrast, one cannot get away from the suspicion with North Korean novels that they exist only to correspond to the society called "the nation." Within society, the individual exists only as a cog in the machine, and the characters in their art are not much different." 

The North Korean novel that would have once fit perfectly into a family-friendly American TV lineup

What does transgressiveness in a North Korean novel look like? Not much different from a family-friendly drama from the late 80s or early 90s in America, actually. I could see it as a show called Divorce Judge, in which a mild-mannered civil court judge takes it upon himself to save the marriages of the couples who show up in his court, filing for divorces. It would have fit right in with Highway to Heaven or Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

Jong Jin U is the judge in this drama. Chae Sun Hui is a stylish but distraught woman in her thirties who shows up one day asking for a divorce. Her husband, Ri Sok Chun, has not come to court with her, but she assures Judge Jong that he's okay with the divorce. He just doesn't want to have to deal with the disgrace of going to the court to work out all the details.

Rather than just make a ruling based on what is presented to him in court, Judge Jong decides to go investigate. He talks to a number of people who know the couple: Ri's boss at the factory where he works on a lathe; Chae's choir director; the village party chief. He also hears from a high-ranking distant relation of Chae's who encourages the judge to just give the couple the divorce they want. (Annnd, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the scene where he goes to the family's house and finds their child alone and possibly coming down with a cold, so he takes the child home with him in the rain, then strips the child down and puts him in a hot bath. Not everything in the novel would have made it past American TV censors. Even in the 80s, I hope that would have raised some red flags.)

Landon was a weird guy, but not bring-a-neighbor's-child-to-your-house-and-give-him-a-bath weird. 

Instead of taking the easy way out, Judge Jong keeps digging. He finds out that Chae has become a little bit haughty since she joined a traveling singing group, because she has gotten used to being cheered and awarded. It's made her despise her blue-collar-factory-man of a husband. The husband is simple and hard-working. After years of late hours and setbacks, he created a "multi-axes screw press" (다축라사 가공기--I don't know enough about machines to know what the right translation is, but it's some kind of machine used in his factory). His invention won third place in a contest, but his wife couldn't care less. She thinks his inventions are a waste of time and the family's resources.

Ri Sok Chun isn't blameless, though. He's simple and hard-working, but he refuses to better himself by going to night school like his wife tells him to. Although he's naturally gifted, his lack of a formal education has kept him from greater success with his inventions.

Judge Jong eventually has a tell-it-like-it-is tete-a-tete with both Ri and Chae. Ri accepts the judge's advice more readily than Chae does, but in the end, they reunite. Along the way, Judge Jong--the B story in his own drama--reconsiders his own attitude toward his wife, whom he sometimes resents for her work that takes her away for long stretches, making him a geographical bachelor. There's also a brief C story about a drunk and a school principal, and Judge Jong fixes that marriage, too.

So orthodox, it's heterodox 

For the most part, the novel contains nothing in it that would scandalize a North Korean readership. Indeed, the novel did well when it came out in 1988. It even sold well in France a few years later when it was translated. It can only be viewed as a success from the point-of-view of public perceptions of the North Korean government.

However, the novel contains seeds of transgression in it, not from challenging the orthodox view of the party, but by agreeing with it so fully, it puts into question how party officials actually behave in the real world. Here are some of the values the novel supports, some of which are expected and some of which were a little surprising:

Unsurprising: The family is the smallest organic unit of society. Judge Jong calls the home "the small society called a family." It's society in miniature. This actually isn't that far off from how Western society has viewed the family for centuries, and the novel takes a very positive view of the family. The final line of the novel reads: "The home is is a beautiful world where human love lives and the future grows."

Unlike in the West, where we believe so strongly in the sanctity of the family we feel the state should be limited in its ability to intervene, the very importance of the family is the reason the state needs to intervene, both for the good of the family and the good of society. If the family is the most basic building block of society, then what happens in one family affects everyone. When refusing to easily grant a divorce, the judge explains that, "The family belongs to the individual, but causing harm to a family is not an individual issue. It's a social issue that many people in the village, the community, and the workplace should care about."

It's a formula that prevents even the sanctity of the family from being able to trump the will of the state, all in the name of the good of the family. The law isn't concerned with just the law, but public morality. The idea of the absolute importance of public morals--which hardly even exists in the West now, we are so used to thinking of morality as an individual issue--pervades the book. It shows up on the first page. The building where the judge decides cases is "not a place that handles beautiful or positive deeds." The narrator also tells us that, "People in the area who live by healthy, moral economic principles and social ethics, who have harmonious homes," wouldn't need to go there, so many don't even know where it is.

There's an element of natural law to this: the novel wants the reader to believe that a harmonious marriage comes with living in accordance with moral precepts, and that these moral precepts are obvious and natural. There is an almost Gothic coincidence in the novel between weather or scenery and the moral rectitude of the characters. When characters are seeking divorce, it's rainy and ugly. When they love each other, it's beautiful.

By associating the harmonious family with nature and nature with public morality, the novel asserts the state's right to intervene in order to restore the natural order of things.

Unsurprising: The key to a moral life is self-reflection. Thae Yong Ho, former North Korean Deputy Ambassador to the UK turned defector, said that it was impossible to understand North Korean life without understanding the life evaluation (생활 총화). At least weekly, North Koreans gather with their work units to criticize each other and themselves. (Korean speakers, there is a good explanation of the topic here.) It's like Catholic confession, but everyone's invited.

In the novel, Judge Jong's criticism of Ri and Chae is what helps them to transform and improve. It also transforms the drunk, the evil committee chairman who tried to ruin the couple's marriage, and Jong's own self-reflection even improves his own attitude about his marriage.

Western literature has long thought of art as a mirror. When Jong criticizes Chae, she sees his accusations as a mirror, but not in a pleasant way: "The judge's expression, soft but piercing, came to her again, and his words, like a surgeon's knife to her heart, rang in her ears. The judge's keen insights shone like a mirror. That mirror showed the flaws inside or her, a clear mirror into her own psyche, like a diagnostic laser."

The judge stresses to both Ri and Chae that he's telling them this as a "friend," not as a judge (hence the title of the book), but it has the same effect as if a judge had said it for both of them.

Surprising: Except sometimes, family does trump the state. Judge Jong admires Ri's work ethic, but tells him that it's not totally unexpected his wife would be unsatisfied with him. As a man, he is responsible for the family's economic health, which means he should strive to provide them with more--which sounds like an incredibly Western idea. Ri should listen to his wife when she tells him to go to night school and try to be more than just a lathe operator. He chides Ri for not approaching family life with the same dedication he does to work in the factory. "The family may be small, but it's your own world linked to society." He tells Ri he is "only sacrificing for the factory and society by working and inventing, but undervaluing his own wife." The same logic used earlier to subjugate the family to society is also used to place the family in at least equal importance.

Surprising: The novel is, in some ways, kind of progressive. When Judge Jong lays into Ri about not striving for more, he accuses him of "a kind of conservatism." Ri can't just stay where he is. The good of the country depends on people wanting more out of life. Again, this is an incredibly Western, almost market-driven-rewards-based-motivational talk here. North Korea will be a city on a hill, but only if the people are as focused on improving themselves as they are the country. Even though it's phrased as for the good of the country, it's a dangerously individualistic way to frame it, because it seems to nearly equate self-improvement with societal improvement, meaning people should be encouraged to follow their own interests.

Even more surprisingly, the novel has a go at at least one high-ranking official. The only bad person in the novel is Chae Rim, the "business technology committee chairman," whatever that is, who is a distant relation to the wife Chae Sun Hui. His position of authority gave Chae Rim the ability to get Ri's invention bumped from first prize to third, which helped stir up his wife's frustration with her husband's inventions and him in general. When the judge realizes what happened, he threatens to throw the book at Chae Rim. The judge muses at one point about how he can't believe such people exist: "Why are there people like that? Hollow people who do not respect the sacred truth of how the country values economic advancement as if it were life itself. And that he rose to a position of administrative authority in technology!"

Criticizing by praising

Paek's novel is standard stuff in how it views North Korea as a paradise, or at least a paradise in the making. It's set in the late 60s or early 70s, which many North Koreans still think of as the golden age of North Korea. That very idealizing of North Korea, though, can itself be a challenge to the status quo, if the status quo is really not living up to the ideals. While seeming to reiterate the propaganda of the country that North Korea is a worker's paradise, it also deconstructs its own paradise, both by asking why imperfections are allowed into paradise, and also by setting a standard for officials that few actual officials meet.

Judge Jong's almost comic-hero-like dedication to duty will surely stand out as far exceeding any official anyone in North Korea knows. Regime censors might see Jong as either a goal for officials to strive for or pure propagandizing, wish-fulfillment fantasy for an official who doesn't exist in the real world. But it won't escape readers that there are a lot more Chae Rims in their world than there are Judge Jongs. The novel manages to demand better of officials by simply repeating what the regime is already telling everyone those officials already are like.