Bestselling Korean novel about a young gay mans search for love has a soap-operatic tone

Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, pub. Grove Press

In almost every novel or film about queer lives in the past 50 years, we are confronted with an exploration of loneliness – in particular, the loneliness felt by queer people who have never been accepted enough that the act of self-acceptance occurs without thought. Without this, the queer person’s road to romantic love is fraught at best.

Affairs, often in excess, account for a never-ending search for substance, a search dotted with heartbreak and unfulfilment. And in a sprawling metropolitan city, being alone almost becomes an identity.

Such is true of the protagonist and narrator of Sang Young Park’s 2019 bestseller Love in the Big City, available now for the first time in English.

Young is a gay Korean man living in Seoul whose life has not turned out the way he wanted it to. Whereas his close friend Jaehee is getting married, forsaking the frivolity of their college days and settling down into something that, for her, looks like stability, he is still chasing one-night stands and trying to find a job (in addition to being a writer) that he actually likes.

Jaehee’s new life casts Young’s in an unsettling light: is it possible for him to find love as well, and does he actually want it? The answer, of course, is yes, but it is only he who seems unable to move on from the casual (and often tumultuous) relationships they both had while younger.

Park devotes the first part of the novel to the past, when Young and Jaehee are living together with no concerns other than what they will have for dinner and where they will party. They dart about the world in youthful aimlessness, a time when their lack of serious romantic attachments is never really a problem.

Not even Young’s ailing Christian mother, who has cancer, dents him enough to worry about being unhappy. But when he is forced to take care of her after Jaehee leaves, he must confront something more than the self-loathing that is the bedrock of his personality.

This predicament leads him to his first substantial relationship, with a man (whose name we never learn) who is right and wrong for him. Older and handsome, he makes Young feel a sense of pride – until their differences prove irresolvable.

“Who was he, and what was I to him?” Young eventually wonders, when he realises that the man is by no means out of the closet and deeply uncomfortable with the “disease of homosexuality”.

His next relationship is with the wonderful Gyu-ho, much closer to his age and different from Young primarily in that he is not from the big city (despite being somewhat of a country bumpkin, he is no less appealing to Young).

For the most part, their relationship is the stuff of dreams – the romantic utopia Young has always wanted. They eventually move in together, but this decision to cohabitate taxes them perhaps more than they can withstand.

Soon after, Gyu-ho finds a job in Shanghai and Young suffers the devastating loss of his departure. Gyu-ho is his true love but Young ultimately cannot have him.

Though this bleak conclusion could be the catalyst for serious reflection, Park’s treatment of it is too superficial to merit more than passing notice.

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Anton Hur’s translation provides helpful access to the Korean context in which the book takes place, but Park renders Young’s voice too much like that of a petulant teenager – so much so that it is difficult to take Young seriously, even when he muses about heartache and isolation.

The novel also lacks meaningful shape, and, as a result, the events unfurl haphazardly and serious plot points emerge too heavy-handedly. The biographical elements from which Park borrows may well be fertile ground for fictional exploration, but they do not lead him towards a well-crafted story.

Instead, we are left with something like a high-school student’s diary: the issues Young confronts are real and important, but he is never provided the kind of insight and depth a more careful writer would have given him to lift this novel above its soap-operatic tone.

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