Review | Bestselling Korean novel about a young gay man’s search for love has a soap-operatic tone
- The narrator of Sang Young Park’s Love in the City is a gay man in Seoul unhappy with his life of casual affairs and seeking a serious relationship
- In that he succeeds, only to be disappointed – an ending that could have been a catalyst for reflection but isn’t, exemplifying the novel’s superficiality
Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, pub. Grove Press
In almost every novel or film about queer lives in the past 50 years, we are confronted with an exploration of loneliness – in particular, the loneliness felt by queer people who have never been accepted enough that the act of self-acceptance occurs without thought. Without this, the queer person’s road to romantic love is fraught at best.
Affairs, often in excess, account for a never-ending search for substance, a search dotted with heartbreak and unfulfilment. And in a sprawling metropolitan city, being alone almost becomes an identity.
Such is true of the protagonist and narrator of Sang Young Park’s 2019 bestseller Love in the Big City, available now for the first time in English.
Young is a gay Korean man living in Seoul whose life has not turned out the way he wanted it to. Whereas his close friend Jaehee is getting married, forsaking the frivolity of their college days and settling down into something that, for her, looks like stability, he is still chasing one-night stands and trying to find a job (in addition to being a writer) that he actually likes.
