Free Food for Millionaires

Free Food for Millionaires is Min Jin Lee's 2007 debut novel, the Pachinko-predecessor that established her literary reputation almost a decade before the breakthrough novel arrived. The setting is late-1990s and early-2000s New York. Casey Han, a Princeton graduate and the Korean-American daughter of Queens dry-cleaner immigrants, has refused her father's pressure into business school in favor of taking a sales-and-trading position at a major Wall Street investment bank. The novel runs the next several years through Casey's professional life, her on-and-off relationship with her Princeton-era boyfriend Jay Currie, the multiple relationships that follow it, her parallel relationship with the Korean-American banker she meets at her family's church, the slow collapse of her parents' marriage, and the question that runs through the entire novel about what assimilation actually costs the children of immigrants in real time.

Lee's structural method is the patient ensemble construction across roughly ten major characters (Casey at the center, her sister Tina at Brown, her parents Joseph and Leah, Jay Currie, the bank colleagues, the church community, the millinery hat-maker Casey takes a side job with as her alternative-career hedge); the novel reads in the literary realist tradition that Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser established and that contemporary American literary fiction usually does not commit to at this scale. The Queens dry-cleaner chapters in the middle third are some of the most carefully written contemporary American literary prose about the operational mechanics of an immigrant small business. The Casey-and-Sabine subplot (the older Korean-American millinery store owner who becomes Casey's professional mentor outside finance) is the structural emotional engine of the back half.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Lee entry point for readers coming to Pachinko's author after Pachinko itself, and as one of the canonical contemporary American novels about the children-of-immigrants finance generation. Read Pachinko (2017) next. The Bonnie Kim audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.