Title: Free Food for Millionaires
Author: Min Jin Lee
Published: May 2007, Grand Central Publishing
I’ll be honest, I picked this book because I wanted something frothy and featuring wealthy people. I googled books like Crazy Rich Asians, and this came up.
Min Jin Lee wrote Pachinko, which was an unforgettable read, so I was quite surprised that she also wrote this, but this one is a debut novel, and I find that many of them mine the author’s own early life.
Free Food for Millionaires is not a novel about rich people. It is a coming-of-age story about a young Korean woman from Queens who is struggling to find her way in the world with the weight of the expectations of an Ivy League degree and her own idealism on her shoulders.
The novel opens with fight over family dinner when Casey’s father sneers at her indecision and unemployment, and Casey is unable to respectfully hold her tongue. The night takes an even more disastrous turn when Casey lands up her white boyfriend Jay Currie’s apartment.
Like Casey, Jay is an outsider to the priviledged world of their wealthy Princeton classmates, but unlike Casey, he has scored an investment banking job, and so can live in relative style. There is a element of Jay Gatsby in this Jay’s desire to be part of New York’s upper crust, and his obsession with Casey, who a bookseller compares to Daisy Buchanan.
But the novel put me more in the mind of Theodore Drieser’s Sister Carrie or Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, young women trying to make their way in the world of New York with stars in their eyes.
Free Food has the twin hallmarks of chick lit with its preoccupation on the romantic and career trajectory of the young woman. There is a whole sub-genre of chick lit set in the world of investment banking, and Casey’s preoccupation with fashion and the good life again calls to mind consumerlit.
The novel evades the confines of popular literature, however, in the way that the narrative plants do not always pay off. I did not see the first disaster coming, but I did see the second, and the third.
I came to this novel expecting a light read, and I got a saga. Lee’s skill is how she gives you a true sense of her many characters, including those we meet only a couple of times, like Casey’s priviledged and irrepressible best friend Virginia or the rare bookseller she meets towards the end of the novel.
I have to say I was kind of exhausted by the end of the novel, but I also suspect it will stay with me, just as the much more accomplished Pachinko did.
Chick Lit Hall of Fame 