Adrift in Berlin, the narrator of Esther Yi’s intricate debut novel works as a copywriter for a business selling canned artichoke hearts. Her job, she informs us, “required [her] to credibly infuse the vegetable with the ability to feel romantic love for its consumer”. She has a sort-of boyfriend, Masterson, though she introduces herself at parties as his adoptive sister, not to shock so much as to indicate the true psychological state of their relationship. Masterson cannot bring himself to fall in love with her, a state of terminal indecisiveness our narrator responds to by falling in love with someone else. When her flatmate Vavra offers her a spare ticket to the first ever Berlin concert by K-pop idols the Pack of Boys, she is initially indifferent. “But this concert will change your life,” her friend insists. What ensues is not change so much as an overthrow of her previous existence.
The first generation of internet novels was preoccupied with technology: the novelty of artificial realities, the threat of surveillance, the confusion caused by covert communication and multiple identities. Twenty years on and digital technology is quotidian. Novelists are if anything even more obsessed with the internet, but what fascinates is societal impact, the ever hazier boundary between the online and the real. Recent years have seen a slew of narratives, notably from younger writers – Olivia Sudjic, Lauren Oyler, Sheena Patel – all deeply concerned with the act of seeing and of being seen. For the narrator of Y/N, the love she feels for Moon, the youngest of the Boys, is felt by her as more real and urgent than the pallid, almost two-dimensional interactions of her mundane experience.
“The fact of the matter was that he couldn’t see me,” she is forced to admit. “Even the possibility of looking dumb in front of him was a privilege beyond my reach.” As compensation for this, she begins posting fan fiction on a site called Archmage, stories in which the reader can insert their own name – “y/n” – and so become the protagonist, interacting with Moon in a liminal space that exists only in their imagination. The last third of the novel sees this idea pushed still further when the narrator, flying to Seoul in an attempt to get closer to Moon, enters the parallel world of gated compound the Polygon Plaza, where the Boys have taken refuge following Moon’s sudden and cataclysmic retirement from public view.
It is at this point that we are forced to ask ourselves if Y/N truly means to be what it masquerades as: a zeitgeisty narrative of parasocial relationships. More than one character remarks on the likeness between Moon and the narrator, and these peculiar doublings, together with a claustrophobic sense of existential yearning, seem to point towards much older stories – the myths of Narcissus and of Pygmalion, timeless parables in which obsessive love is more revealing of the lover than of the beloved. In one peculiarly resonant moment, the narrator is handed an ultrasonic scan of Moon’s internal organs. As she wonders “why [she] never thought to hang posters of Moon’s insides on [her] walls”, we might think of the romantic exchange of X-rays that takes place in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and wonder if, beneath the uber-modern surface trappings, a deeper dialogue with earlier texts is being conducted.
This is a curious, cerebral work, shot through with moments of tender poetry and a vertiginous self-awareness. Lost in the maze of Y/N’sits endgame, how much y/n enjoys this novel will come down to how much it matters that there is no Minotaur at the maze’s centre, just a hall of mirrors, or better yet an echo chamber, an empty chair on which it is inevitable that y/n will sit.
• Y/N is published by Europa Editions (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
