Book Review: “The Band” by Christine Ma-Kellams
Putting the O in K-pop
I used to work for an outfit where there was an Asian Canadian on my team. One day, during small talk and after learning that I used to review music, he tried to impress me with his musical taste — and you need to know that he was probably still in his 20s here — by showing me a K-pop (or Korean-pop) group sampling the chorus of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby.” I had to break it to him that the source material was Queen and David Bowie. So, what’s the point of this story? If you’re into current pop and not much else, then I would suspect that your affinity for music only goes back so far. And, as I’d like to think, K-pop is a genre of music that speaks specifically to the now. It doesn’t get nostalgic for anything further back than what most millennials will remember. That’s why listening to K-pop is, I believe, a young person’s game. (But, Internet, prove me wrong.) In any event, Christine Ma-Kellams’ debut novel, The Band, is about a K-pop group that is more famous than the Royal Family (if looking at social media hits was solely considered) and what happens when one of the core members suddenly decides to leave and ends up in southern California.
To wit, a young man known as Sang Duri, also known as “Pretty Boy,” is the oldest member of a K-pop group called The Band, and in keeping with what I just said in the preceding paragraph, the author of this novel seems unaware that there was a musical group of the same name that existed in the late ’60s and early ’70s — ahem, they were famous enough to be Bob Dylan’s backing band if you know who he is. (The guy has, after all, won a thing known as the Nobel Prize for Literature.) Anyhow, Duri winds up leaving the band at the height of its fame because — for reasons that are a little confusing — he got canceled for having a solo song and video that was somehow offensive to Japanese people. (I’ve read the book and have concluded that, whatever it was that drew people’s ire, didn’t seem to be all that offensive, but maybe my skin is thick.) So, he’s walking along in an H-Mart in California and strikes up a conversation with a middle-aged Chinese woman who is happily married to a white man and with whom she has had two kids with. Next thing you know, Duri is living with the woman and her family, while receiving a bit of therapy from her as she is a psychology professor at a local university or college, where she does most of the work from home. That’s pretty much it as far as the plot goes — at least, without revealing any major spoilers, as some interesting stuff does happen towards the back of the read.
The Band — if you look past its pop-culture blindness — is an affable read and a wonderful piece of wish fulfillment. The book covers a lot of ground, from #MeToo feminism to deranged fans to AI-generated holograms and on and on and on. As such, it is a book meant to be read in the year 2024, and probably won’t have much of a shelf life — at least, once K-pop recedes and becomes something fondly looked at in the rear-view mirror. That’s an apt comparison because bubble-gum music is meant to be consumed and enjoyed all at once with no lasting staying power, which is what I think is going to happen to this genre of music — not that I’m an expert in it or anything. (I’m not saying that sarcastically. I just haven’t come across a lot of this music in my travels. I’ve heard of BTS, for instance, but I don’t think I’ve heard them.) Having said that, I think The Band is a tremendously enjoyable book. But nobody is going to come to recognize it as an instant classic or something we’ll all still be reading 100 years from now (well, for those of us still alive by then). It’s a fun and invigorating read and it’s short, too. My Kindle had pegged my reading speed for this one at three and a half hours. But does that mean that this novel is inscrutable within its genre parameters?
Well, no. The Band has an annoying tendency to drop footnotes, as though the writing was somehow more academically inclined to warrant such as thing. Footnotes are a dicey proposition at any time, but particularly in a novel on a Kindle, which is ill-equipped to handle them. The use of footnotes can also render your work as being pretentious, which is not what I think the author was going for. And as usual for the case of books featuring music as a significant backdrop, it’s crying out for an accompanying soundtrack to let people know just what music like this would sound like. (It’s a combination of hip-hop and pop at rapid-fire speeds, and I would like to know what the mishmash between Korean and English lyrics would sound like.) Still, despite all of that, readers with a taste for current music are going to have a whole lot of joy with this book. It’s kind of a little like The Bodyguard, but with the romance element muted and more platonic. And I must say it’s refreshing to read a book where the male and female leads aren’t jumping in the sack with each other. Thus, The Band gets a pass — even if it’s oblivious to its pop culture history. I’m sure this is the book that crazy rich Asians everywhere will be reading this summer at the beach or the backyard barbeque. And then, I’m equally sure, we’ll all just forget about it and move along to the next big shiny bauble. That’s not a condemnation, just an admission that we probably won’t be hearing much more about this book when September finally rolls around. Because, you know, pop culture is a transient sort of thing.
Christine Ma-Kellams’s The Band was published by Atria Books / Simon & Schuster on April 16, 2024.
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