THE BAND, by Christine Ma-Kellams
K-pop idols, the international megastars of Korean music, inhabit a strange, fascinating place in the ecosystems of modern culture. In some ways, they’re just like the stars of generations past, like the Beatles or the Backstreet Boys: worshiped for their youth; admired as sex objects; lauded for voices and songs that millions can’t forget; raised up, and sometimes crushed, by a fickle public and a corporate machine.
In other ways, though, K-pop stars represent a new model of fame. They’re global exports from a war-forged country, signifying beauty and cool and Asianness (whatever that means outside Asia) to an ultra-connected world. These contemporary idols are both beneficiaries and victims in a slicker-than-ever regimen that gives them no room for error, no autonomy and no life outside the digital web’s ever-open eye.
Christine Ma-Kellams’s brief, thoughtful debut novel, “The Band,” explores these two ideas — K-pop as one more version of stardom; K-pop as something unique — while also posing new questions: What if K-pop stars, who work so hard to rise up and then inevitably tire out, actually resemble the rest of us? What if the dangers of fame resemble a more familiar white-collar ennui?
Most of the novel follows a sweetly sad, quietly self-destructive singer named Duri, the “Pretty Boy” in an A-list K-pop act called simply the Band. At the start of the book, Duri releases a music video about a boy who turns into a fish in order to see his fisherman father, who catches him and tries to make him into sashimi. We readers can see a lonely young man’s frustrated wish for found family, but Duri’s Korean and Japanese fans find the video offensively anti-Japanese. Canceled online and perhaps burned out by fame, Duri goes AWOL, leaving both his audience and his bandmates wondering where he went, and whether he’ll ever come back.
In fact, he’s fled to Southern California. There, in an H-Mart, he encounters Ma-Kellams’s unnamed narrator, a Chinese American psychology professor with two children, a beautiful home and a neglectful husband. She’s bored and lonely. He wants a hide-out. Will she take him in when he asks? Of course. Will they sleep together? Ma-Kellams makes us wait for the answer to that one. Other chapters introduce the rest of the Band, along with their Seoul-based Svengali, a producer nicknamed Pinocchio. The story also jumps to the past, teasing the sad fate of Pinocchio’s first creation, a trio of girls to whom something bad happened. What exactly occurred? The novel makes us wait for that answer, too. All these many plots and subplots come together, eventually, once the Band travels to America.
Like her narrator, Ma-Kellams is a cultural psychologist who teaches at San Jose State University. She’s even written a college textbook about her field. That expertise shapes the book — references and footnotes to studies about out-group homogeneity effects, cultural norms about modesty, selective attention tests and more dot the novel like tasty peppercorns.
Other fandom novels, like Zan Romanoff’s “Grace and the Fever,” follow teens; Ma-Kellams cares mostly about adults. The story moves fast, almost too fast, given the number of threads that it has to unite, though it does tie them all up elegantly. Ma-Kellams has little to say about K-pop’s sounds, but much about spotlights, labor and alienation. She is not the first novelist to examine the supposedly poisoned chalice of fame, or, as her narrator puts it, the “compulsively addictive thinking” that can make an outward success want to die. She may, though, be one of the first to get at these ideas through a roving, time- and perspective-jumping story that links K-pop with classic psychological research. We all face pressure to succeed, and to look good doing it, she implies, famous or not. Some of us nearly work ourselves to death.
THE BAND | By Christine Ma-Kellams | Atria Books | 210 pp. | $26.99
