capsule reviews

Esther Yi, David Fincher, Ava Gardner

Ava Gardner advertises Bur-Mil Cameo stockings, 1954

Y/N (Esther Yi, 2023)

A Korean American woman living in Berlin becomes obsessed with “Moon”—a member of a K-pop boyband. She writes a strange, baroque piece of “Y/N” (which stands for “your name”) fan fiction about Moon. But then he abruptly retires; she’s thrown into confusion. She decides to go to Seoul, where she has family, to find him.

This book is amazing. Well—it’s amazing right up until Yi has to figure out how to end this thing. At that point, it just sort of crash lands.¹ But I honestly didn’t much care. While Moon’s band and its fervent, frightening following (they’re called “livers”) are quite obviously based on BTS, nothing in this book is even remotely like “real life.”² No, this is a book in which people plop down next to the narrator and say things like this without being prompted to do so:

You …