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Deep in Suburbia - The New York Times Abstract

Deep in Suburbia
February 29, 2004
By CHARLES McGRATH
I once saw Chang-rae Lee being hugged in the grill room of
an exclusive country club by someone he barely knew. Lee,
who was a guest at the club, froze for a moment and then
tentatively but politely hugged back. The embrace was not
an expression of literary adulation. The hugger had no idea
that Lee's first novel, ''Native Speaker,'' won the
Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1996, that his second
novel, ''A Gesture Life,'' was named one of the best books
of 1999 by several newspapers and magazines or that The New
Yorker had named him one of the 20 best American writers
under 40. The man, who played golf with Lee a week or so
before, was simply thanking him, as Lee's golf partners
often do, for helping him win a couple of nice side bets.
Lee now lives, with his wife and two young daughters, in
Princeton, N.J. -- just a stone's throw, not accidentally,
from a golf course. I got to know him in the late 90's,
when he was living in Bergen County, just a couple of towns
away from me, and our friendship has survived an
unfortunate Fourth of July incident when, in an excess of
fireworks enthusiasm, I nearly blew up his house. We play
golf together (he wins), share the occasional meal and
speak once in a while on the phone. We almost never talk
about books or writing (possibly because, full disclosure,
I am the editor of The Times Book Review), but I doubt that
he has many literary conversations with anybody else.
Lee is probably the most unwriterly writer I know. He's
cheerful and well adjusted, a homebody, a 10-handicap
golfer and a serious foodie. He seldom goes to book
parties, and he doesn't follow the literary gossip. In the
darker, more invidious corners of literary New York, it is
sometimes said of him, as it is of a few others thought to
be unnaturally nice, that his apparent happiness and lack
of problems must be a coverup for something really messed
up.
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