Anyone who has an idol has dreamed of finding them, alone and down on their luck, and becoming the only person they can trust. In many books this is the start of a daydream romance. In The Band, it is the start of dizzying, darkly humorous nightmare. Ma-Kellams’ fiction debut is an incisive examination of stardom, fandom, and parasocial relationships, both in K-pop and in ways applicable to a wide array of cultural phenomena, and it goes deeper than the hand-wringing to be found on social media. This book lays bare what drives real people to adore, and ultimately strive to possess, the projected “selves” of celebrities: dissatisfaction with reality that stems from loneliness, unhappiness, and the desire to adore and be adored at a level impossible to truly achieve. Our elusive narrator does not step fully into the frame until chapter seven, but she relates the interlocking histories of two Kpop groups with intimate knowledge that suggests either that she is omniscient or practicing the stan’s art of investigating and projecting what goes on behind the scenes of fame. As brutally honest–or at least blunt–as she can be, the narrator hardly touches on the most emotionally charged moments of her life, the roots of her own discontent. She breezes past them with (feigned?) nonchalance or elides them with footnotes and hints about her “next novel.” She appears to bare all while dodging true vulnerability–and isn’t that the point? She, like so many, is standing on the precipice of relinquishing herself to fantasy. Ma-Kellams’ prose is arch and clever, studded with research and footnotes, but it never feels overdone or gimmicky. The style is true to the novel’s heart. Her turns of phrase alternately made me laugh out loud and marvel at the depth of insight in a handful of words. While white American celebrities get special treatment, Korean celebrities in LA do not: “If said talent hails from some other part of the world, on the other hand, everyone gets treated as an equal, meaning, a nobody. The opposite of a somebody is an egalitarian.” It is ultimately this book’s compassion that allows its cultural critique to land. We see real sadness and human need in our narrator and her wayward celebrity houseguest. We see the real human cost of the system that entices and entraps idols and their idolators. I devoured this book in a few sittings, but I will be thinking about it for much, much longer.
The Band by Christine Ma-Kellams, (List Price: $27, Atria Books, 9781668018378, April 2024)
Reviewed by Luca Rhatigan, Epilogue: Books Chocolate Brews in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
