Entertainment
Katherine Min was ahead of her time. Four years after her death, her second novel proves it
On the Shelf
The Fetishist
By Katherine Min
G.P. Putnam’s Sons: 304 pages, $28
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This is the story of a fabulous book that almost never was. A lush and vicious novel with the pacing and urgency of a thriller, “The Fetishist” revolves around desire and revenge, focusing on the abduction of a classical musician with a history of predatory behavior by the punk-rocker daughter of his former paramour, who had killed herself after being spurned by him. It’s the second novel by Katherine Min and it arrives nearly four years after her death.
Min was a connector, a writer and professor who built communities through residencies, conferences and classrooms. This explains why her posthumous publication will be marked by a substantial book tour (including a Los Angeles stop Jan. 23) shepherded by a legion of friends and former students and helmed by her daughter, Kayla Min Andrews, who recovered the file that became “The Fetishist.”
While I was neither Min’s peer nor her student, I was a devoted reader of her work. In August 2006, I met Min at the MacDowell Colony shortly before the publication of her debut novel, “Secondhand World,” at Knopf, where I was then an editorial assistant. Her enthusiastic and unguarded demeanor was refreshing, and I loved her intense but tender novel. Her reading at the KGB Bar in Manhattan that fall struck me as an auspicious launch. Sadly, it was her last book tour.
“Secondhand World” was a coming-of-age novel, set in upstate New York in the 1970s, with autobiographical elements of the immigrant experience. But it was also a propulsive, remarkably literary work that burned with complicated longing. Knopf senior editor Victoria Wilson bought the novel for “the virtue and power of its writing.”
In the early aughts, books that captured the Korean American experience were not so prevalent, much less wildly feted (this was before Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko” and Michelle Zauner’s “Crying in H Mart”). One fan of “Secondhand World,” Putnam publisher Sally Kim, kept it on a small section of her bookshelf devoted to (the precious few) Korean American novels. She would end up editing “The Fetishist,” but at the time, Min’s debut didn’t find a wide audience.
Speaking over the phone 18 years later, Wilson remembers Min’s intensity, commitment and seemingly limitless promise. Knopf had a crowded list that fall — the season of “The Emperor’s Children,” “Half of a Yellow Sun” and other breakthroughs — but Wilson and others worked hard to bring attention to Min. Publicist Tessa Shanks recalls “cooking up a scheme” with Min to stretch the touring budget toward as many cities as possible. “I believe Vicky was a little taken aback by our excitement for what was a relatively small book,” says Shanks.
“Secondhand World” created a path for Min to become a tenured professor at University of North Carolina in Asheville. It received praise and a nomination for a PEN/Bingham award. Min continued to write at artists’ residencies, working on what would become “The Fetishist.” But when she was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer in early 2014, she shut the door on fiction.
Instead, Min shifted to nonfiction. “It was like a switch was pulled,” remembers her friend, writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee. Min “felt an urgent need to write essays, particularly on her new perspective on life having cancer.” While Lee is pleased by the publication of “The Fetishist,” she also hopes these essays will be published as a collection. “Even through all her treatments and their side effects … she was always writing. That was her way of being.”
Min brought the same commitment to this work as to her fiction. “She wasn’t willing to compromise the urgency at their core in order to receive faint praise or recognition,” remembers another friend, writer and translator Geoffrey Brock. When a “well-known journal” proposed “some wrongheaded cuts,” she withdrew the piece and sent it to Brock at the Arkansas International, where he ran it intact. (“An orange I can manage,” runs the darkly funny opening. “This sumo orange, with its pocky skin and bulbous shnozz.”)
“If there was any silver lining to the way she went out,” says Brock, “it was that she did so with that kind of confidence … intact, despite those publishing realities that must have made it hard to maintain.”
The year Min died, her family created a fellowship in her name at MacDowell, where she was an artist-in-residence eight times, which would provide opportunities for Asian American writers. This did much to preserve her memory, but what about her unpublished work?
Kayla Min Andrews helped bring out “The Fetishist,” the second novel by her late mother, Katherine Min, and worked to complete it.
(Bryan Tarnowski/Bryan Tarnowski)
Initially, the family hoped Min’s essays could be published as a collection. To that end, Kayla Min Andrews approached her mother’s friend, the writer Cathy Park Hong. Hong connected Andrews with P.J. Mark, Hong’s literary agent.
Reached by email, Mark recalls thinking the collection could work — if introduced and properly framed by her contemporaries. But he asked Andrews about any additional material. She mentioned that Min had shared individual chapters from her novel-in-progress before her diagnosis. “I had a sense of the characters,” Andrews recalls of her mother’s manuscript. “I had some sense of the plot, but I had never read the whole draft in order.”
After talking to Mark, Andrews went back to her mother’s laptop which she now used as her own. The files were there — a complete version of the novel, including notes on elements to add or check. It was dated from the end of February 2014, just before Min’s diagnosis. For an ostensibly unfinished manuscript, it was remarkably polished.
“The Fetishist” was Mark’s introduction to her fiction. “I found it hilarious and moving and so contemporary, which surprised me as it had been written some years ago.” Predating #MeToo, the novel directly addresses a generational shift away from patriarchal resignation. In the novel, Min pursues the idea of matching violence with violence, but also explores the gray area of reconciliation and rehabilitation. To Mark, “it felt like a timeless comic fable of revenge and also a modern cultural critique. And even though I had no attachment to Katherine, I felt an urgent responsibility for the book and to honor her legacy, which was an unexpected feeling I couldn’t explain.”
Kayla Min Andrews, left, with her mother, Katherine Min.
(Courtesy of Kayla Min Andrews)
Mark had an ideal editor in mind: Sally J. Kim. He offered her an exclusive submission.
Reading the manuscript alongside the rest of Min’s work felt, to Kim, like having a conversation with Min in her head over the course of one intense week. Kim thought, “What would she think of our world today, which has changed so much since her passing in 2019 — the pandemic, George Floyd, AAPI hate? I wished I could talk to her about so many things. I still do.”
During the editing process, Andrews, herself a writer, stepped in eagerly on her mother’s behalf, working hand in hand with Kim to expand scenes and smooth out loose ends. “There were moments and lines,” Kim says, “that startled me in how prescient Katherine had been about Asian American identity, objectification, desire and how all these things often get tangled up.”
For all of Andrews’ hard work, “The Fetishist” ultimately owes its publication not just to those with a personal stake in her life but to the people who found immense value in her work.
“I was never lucky enough to have met Katherine,” says Kim, “but I have such a strong sense of her wisdom, her warmth, her wit, her ferocity. It’s driven me to do everything I can for this book. I’ve been in book publishing for almost 30 years, and in many ways Katherine’s struggles as an emerging Asian American writer run parallel to my own, and there are times that I mourn that fact, for both of us. But it also feels as though I’ve worked my whole career to be in the position to publish this book in the fulsome way that it deserves. This book is a celebration.”
LeBlanc is a critic and board member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her Substack is laurenleblanc.substack.com.
Here’s a thriller that Maurice Escher could have production designed, with Salvador Dalí decorating the sets and Stanley Kubrick behind the camera directing.
Not that Youtube phenom turned horror filmmaker Kane Parsons is the new Kubrick. But in turning his “Backrooms” found footage horror video series into a feature film, he and his production designer Danny Vermette (“Longlegs”) and art director Alan Derksen summon up not just cinematic horror imagery of the past, but of the most disturbing painters in the canon.
A visual essay in the sinister possibilities of a minimalist unknown becomes something deeper with nightmarish echoes of Heironymous Bosch and Dalí pasted on a yellow on yellow settings that could have been inspired by Mondrian.
This summer’s “Blair Witch Project” horror phenomenon is about a stressed, divorced furniture store owner who stumbles into an alternate reality by stepping through the walls of the basement of his bland ’90s surburban warehouse store.
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, bringing the “real”) never seems to have any customers, which only adds to the bitter edge his drinking has taken on.
“Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire” is a badly-named “cheap particle board” furniture warehouse store which Clark tries to advertise with DIY commercials of himself dressed as a furniture pirate. The whole “pirate” or “sultan” branding doesn’t work and even his young dead-end employees (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett) get that they don’t “get it.”
It’s only with his therapist (Renate Reinsve of “Sentimental Value” and “The Worst Person in the World”) that Clark gets into the reasons for his anger. He lost his house in a divorce to his perpetual law-student wife.
“I hurt people,” he confesses. “It’s just the way I”m wired.”
Role-playing the “big fight” that ended his marriage doesn’t help, and we wonder if published author Dr. Mary has a clue about how to get Clark “forging a new path” to better mental health.
The dude’s sleeping in his furniture store, after all. He’s got almost nowhere to go but up. But will he?
Something about this yellow wallppaper and yellowish carpet milieu of vast rooms, empty sections, cubicles with no one in them, wonky wiring and PA and CCTV systems gives him and us as viewers the creeps.
Poking around in the basement has him poking a wall because he hears something, and then freaking out when his arm and indeed his entire body go right through it.
Horror films that cast really good actors are the ones that manage the proper level of “This can’t be happening” shock and awe at what transpires. Clark absorbs the shock. Then he “explores” this beyond-the-basement-wall realm — mysterious piles of what looks like furniture, but “make no sense” as chairs or desks or what have you.
Half-buried manikin parts protrude, Dalí style, out of the floor. An advertising standee with a pirate on it chirps away greetings in a parade of languages. Walls recede into some pointed forced perspective and shafts and tunnels present themselves to Clark, who knows there’s someone or something in there with him. It’s just that he can’t help but come back.
Trying to explain to his therapist this “New York Subway System…massive” maze of rooms and corridors gets him nowhere. And rounding up his two employees to join him for this “expedition” to video what they find seems a mistake. It always is.
“Backrooms” is primarily a triumph of horrific tone, with a handful of grim and gruesome shocks to sate viewers who like their horror violent and bloody.
The look and the psychological mystery at the heart of it feed into the chill that sets in early and rarely leaves your mind. Horror conventions such as a character being snatched out of the frame and “Slenderman” like figures — and a dwarf — are tucked into this “Everything Everywhere All at Once” universe of an underworld.
The finale is entirely too conventional and pat to fit the general weirdness of all that’s preceded it. And as we ponder the puzzle what connects these people to that place — literal or mental — we have to consider what indie cinema icon Mark Duplass might be playing and what Reinsve is getting at as we see and hear her struggle to emote or even hit the right word emphasis in sentences in English.
But Ejiofor is the casting coup here, an actor who buys in and makes us join him as he utters even the most exhausted lines in horror — “Look, I know this sounds crazy.” Because it is. Until it starts to make sense, almost in spite of all the over-explaining that dominates the closing scenes.
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass.
Credits: Directed by Kane Parsons, scripted by Will Soodik, based on the Kane Parsons video series. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:50
Matt Brown, who starred with his family in the Discovery reality television show “Alaskan Bush People,” was found dead in the Okanogan River in Washington state, law enforcement officials said Sunday.
Brown’s body was discovered Saturday by a group of private citizens who were conducting a search, the Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
Brown’s brother, Bear Brown, said in a video posted Saturday on social media that fellow brother Noah had been with the search team, helped pull the body out of the river and identified him.
The official cause and manner of death is still to be determined by the coroner, the sheriff’s office said. But the Brown family believes Matt Brown died by suicide, Bear Brown said in the video.
Witnesses said they saw Matt Brown in or near the river and that he “took his own life,” Bear Brown said on social media.
“I would have never suspected he would hurt himself, honestly,” Bear Brown said in the emotional video. “He struggled for a long time.”
Bear Brown said his brother had battled with alcohol and drugs and that Matt Brown told him in their last conversation that he had “fallen off the wagon.”
The Brown family and their life in the Alaskan wilderness were the subject of the reality TV show “Alaskan Bush People,” which ran on the Discovery Channel from 2014 to 2022.
Suicide prevention and crisis counseling resources
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek help from a professional or call 988. The nationwide three-digit mental health crisis hotline will connect callers with trained mental health counselors. Or text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line.
- PRESSURE
- Starring: Brendan Fraser, Andrew Scott and Kerry Condon
- Directed by: Anthony Maras
- Rated: R
- Running time: 1 hr 40 mins
- Focus Features
Our score: 3.5 out of 5
On the most recent episode of our “Back in the Day” podcast the crew and I took a look at some of the greatest war movies ever made. In doing my research I learned that there have been more then 5,000 feature films dealing with World War II alone. 5,000!! Some of them are regarded as some of the best films ever made (The Best Years of Our Lives, Patton, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) while others I’d never seen. As Memorial Day rolls along this year we are treated to another one: Pressure.
The film opens on the aftermath of what can only be called a horrible tragedy. Overlooking the carnage, General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Fraser) can only curse.
Jump ahead six months where we meet British meteorologist James Stagg (Scott). Awaiting the birth of his child, he is summoned to meet with Eisenhower and his staff to forecast the weather conditions that will be taking place during an operation they are calling “D-Day.” Stagg continually butts heads with Colonel Krick (Chris Messina), whose method of predicting future weather from past events is not a practice Stagg embraces. The two continually clash, much to the chagrin of an increasingly agitated Eisenhower. Doing her best to keep the peace is Lieutenant Kay Summersby (Condon), Eisenhower’s aide and buffer. It’s not an easy job.
Well presented with an outstanding attention to detail, Pressure could be looked at as the prequel to Saving Private Ryan, which opens with the invasion of Normandy, while this film looks at the events leading up to that day. The cast is strong, with Fraser at his best when going head to head with British General Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis), whose “gung – ho” attitude robs Ike the wrong way. It doesn’t help that “Monty” keeps referencing that, unlike others, he has battlefield experience. He also throws “Exercise Tiger,” easily Eisenhower’s worse military chapter, out when it suits him. (NOTE: For those unaware, Exercise Tiger was basically a practice run for D-Day, with young soldiers taking place in a military exercise. However, due to poor communications, live ammunition was used and nearly 1,000 soldiers and seamen were killed.)
The film has it’s dramatic moments but it’s also anti-climactic because, while they continually stress that the invasion will take place on June 5th, anyone with any knowledge of history knows D-Day was June 6th. So when Ike asks if everything is good for June 5th, you want to shake your head and tell him “no, sir.”
That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the film. I did. When I was born, Eisenhower was president – JFK would be elected two months later. And it was a genuine treat to be sitting in the theatre with some of Eisenhower’s great grandchildren. It lent a nice historical aspect to the screening.
On a scale of zero fo five, Pressure receives ★★★ ½
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