SOURCE: A review of Native Speaker, in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. LXII, No. 23, December 1, 1994, p. 1565.

[In the following review of Native Speaker, the critic lauds Lee's prose style and development of characters.]

In quiet, rich tones, Korean-American Henry Park, the narrator of this debut, speaks more clearly about his estranged wife than about his work.

Verlyn Klinkenborg on Native Speaker:

If there is such a thing as a genre of first novels, Native Speaker subverts the conventions of that genre. It takes as its subjects the things that often preoccupy novelists on their first outing—language, family, identity—and it turns them inside out, making literal what is usually only metaphorical. Lee honors the feeling of being a secret witness to the strangeness of one's family by making Park a real spook. Park's worries about language are almost obsessively literal, a matter of "r"s and "l"s, the...