A Tender Age - Hardcover

Lee, Chang-Rae

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798217048441

Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

“Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee?”—The Los Angeles Times

"He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself." —Jhumpa Lahiri

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence.


A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.

Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.

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Chang-rae Lee is the author of six other novels, including Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A 2021 winner of the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.

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A life can catch up to you.


It’s a wonder, really. One morning, maybe you woke up too early, the span of years will collapse and meet you in full. There’s no great thwack. Hardly even a jolt. You could follow the usual motions of the day.


But here you are, resolving to pay more attention. You need to pay more attention. Otherwise, you can easily misplace your everyday fortunes, the fact, say, that you have a loving spouse who is inordinately talented and impassioned; children who have grown up to be wry and kind, and for whom you’d give your life without pause; work that is consuming enough but not ruinously; friends to share food and drink with, and to tell silly stories. Still, I don’t always cherish things as deeply as I should. I try as hard as I can and continue to fail. I want to be here, even if I’m often dreaming. Each moment is a singular moment, particular in its coordinates, the countless dimensions in which those coordinates can be observed and measured a marvelous conspiracy that fixes us in a way that will never be repeated.


And yet we can’t help but keep going back to old times, futilely scratching at a spot. It doesn’t matter how significant a certain event or instance was, sometimes the barest irritation will draw incommensurate attention and the skin can go raw before you realize it. Lately, I can’t seem to help but linger on this time or that, those tender ages rife with curiosities, and go over in serial fashion what I might have done or said to defuse a tricky situation or take a more principled stand or else assuage my frustrated heart. So many chances, ceded. What remains are these disparate patches of existence that end up knitting vaster and less randomly than you would have ever imagined.


The other day, for instance, I was suddenly thinking about the circumstances of how our girls got our dog. It’s no big thing. We met him when he was three months, while we were on a vacation in Florida. Old friends happened to live there, a family with a boy and a girl the same ages as our daughters, and during an afternoon visit with them the wife casually mentioned that they were looking for someone to adopt their new puppy. Our girls were playing tug-of-war with the dog, a black-and-white toy terrier and shih zhu mix, squealing as he wrenched at the snout of the armadillo plush toy and made his tiny throaty growls, and when they heard her say adopt they both cried out, “Please, Momma, please!” They knew not to entreat me, as I was firmly against having a pet—we traveled too often, was my rationale—but my wife, whose neck instinctively flushed with their joy, let out a long sigh and met my eyes, and I understood what had now become the inevitable. The puppy was undeniably cute, with wistful, floppy ears and a corkscrew tail that shook like a rattler’s, and he seemed sweet-mannered besides, and so with genuine curiosity and a last hope for a reprieve I wondered aloud how they could possibly give him up. Our other dog is super jealous was one response, The puppy sheds too much was another, both somewhat lame justifications that of course only ensured that we would take him.


After lunch, while our families took the dogs for a walk, my friend and I had a smoke and whiskey on his back deck, which overlooked the waterway. We’d known each other since childhood, but he’d been transferred away from the New York area just after our first children were born, and we exchanged news of the old gang, the comings and goings of jobs and moves, half joking about our sudden-onset middle age and various physical diminishments. The usual breezy stuff that precedes the more real turn in the conversation—raising kids, paying school fees and mortgages, the sex after many years of marriage—which in turn signals the conversation’s near end. All fine. We could hear our families entering the house—my friend’s son, oddly, had a habit of hooting like an owl—and we clinked our tumblers, finishing them off.


“Hey, thanks for taking on the little guy,” my friend said. “Better for all.”


“Except me,” I said. “I’ll be the one picking up his shit.”


“At least they’ll always be one-handers,” he said. “I bought him for Colt. I hoped he would stop bothering Pepper.” Pepper was their other dog, an adult Pekingese.


“Well, looks like Pepper always fights back.”


His face seemed to shade, and I was going to pursue it, but then everybody came out with ice cream sandwiches, and we watched the fishing boats and pleasure yachts pass by. It was a perfect way to end a good visit. When we departed the girls had their new puppy and all his accompanying gear and food and treats, and back at our vacation rental, they immediately filled his food and water bowls and knelt beside him as they coaxed him to eat. But the “little guy”—as yet renamed—had trouble. He surely was hungry, but it was all he could do to simply approach the bowl. Every time he got within a muzzle’s length he’d suddenly recoil, as though the food might leap up and snap him. The girls initially found this humorous, but he really wasn’t going to get close enough to eat, and when my younger daughter nudged him forward he began whimpering, literally digging his heels into the carpeting. He lost it and peed. Eventually we figured out that if one of the girls held him in her lap he’d accept the dry food; he was still anxious but gently plucked the kibble from their fingers, which made them very happy.
Pu-chu, I must admit, has been a fine dog. He’s feisty and barky with strangers, but soon enough he’ll be extra-friendly, even clingy and docile. He’s certainly never bitten anyone. The girls are no longer living at home so it’s just the three of us. My wife is by far his favorite, he never leaves her side, although when she’s out he’ll sometimes come around and curl himself up next to my desk chair. It’s true that he sheds a lot, faint sprays of white fur perennially dusted about the house. I complain when I vacuum but don’t really mind.


And he eats almost like a normal dog once you get him going. Just before he’ll attempt the first jawful his gears grind, there’s a stuttering in his neck, something blocking him from finally reaching it. After a couple taps of the index finger next to the food on our kitchen floor—Pu-chu still can’t abide a bowl—he’ll break the chain and gobble as quickly as he can, his claws skittering on the tile the moment he’s done as he scrambles away. We have theories as to why he eats this way. All of them feature Colt, the little boy who hooted, especially after we heard what his sister told our daughters, that her brother pretended his new pet was a special military type, born with astounding capabilities of strength and agility; that he’d perch the pup in the middle of a lemon tree, to see how he would get himself down; or that he’d start a small leaf fire on the driveway and compel Pu-chu by leash to leap it; or what my daughter later recounted witnessing the very day of our visit, that Colt placed him near the edge of their ping-pong table, quite a height for such a young, toy breed, and then started slowly pushing him off.


They haven’t been together since, but you can’t help but wonder how Pu-chu would react if Colt, who by now must be college age, suddenly appeared in our kitchen. The scent of him would surely collapse the years. I’d like to think Pu-chu would growl, maybe even leap at him. But what’s most likely, what’s sadly fated for any warm-blood...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Riverhead Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798217048441
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar