ABSTRACT
The author of Clay Walls, Kim Ronyoung has a sharp eye for telling detail. Man and place are clear and focused in a credible rendering of the life of Koreans in Los Angeles a half century ago (see Chapter 50). The strength of a novel lies in two things: that it be true to itself, the interior vision of the author, and the narrative demands of the form meshing to create a self-contained imaginative world rushing down the millcourse of destiny to an inevitable close; and that this fictional world somehow references the “actual” world of day-to-day experience. Koreans should behave as Koreans, ModelT’s should behave as ModelT’s (and so they do in an exemplary way in Clay Walls, though I remember ModelT’s as somewhat more malevolent, delivering an occasional disabling “kick” to the man on the crank).
