EXHIBIT, by R.O. Kwon
“Everything was beautiful at the ballet,” goes the famous song from “A Chorus Line,” but of course backstage there are blisters, anorexia and worse, like the feathers popping out of Natalie Portman’s back in “Black Swan.”
Hypnotic and sometimes perplexing, R.O. Kwon’s second novel, “Exhibit,” literalizes the twinning of pain and art with a ballerina character who is an actual sadomasochist.
Kwon’s protagonist, Jin, is a photographer who becomes interested in portraiture after drifting away from God. “People, not relics, I thought, at which point the images began rioting to life.” At a party thrown by a guy named Irving in the rarefied quarter of Marin County, Calif., she encounters the ballerina, Lidija: a principal, known for her floating jump, who bypassed the slog of the corps. She’s tattooed and unfazed by an injured leg.
“It was a lifelong allure, the gloss of a bold, strong girl,” Jin thinks.
Inconveniently, she has come to the party with her husband, Philip, a film producer, whom she met at a college called Edwards that readers of Kwon’s widely heralded and more plot-packed first novel, “The Incendiaries,” will recognize. Indeed one of Jin’s photography projects — in a sort of “Black Swan”-like authorial doubling — is to reimagine an alternate ending for that book’s protagonist, Phoebe, who rather than rejecting religion was sucked into a cult. Jin swaps out pictures of Phoebe for historical images before showing her piece publicly so as not to offend one of their mutual acquaintances.
Part of Lidija’s appeal is that she argues for aesthetic integrity over tact or propriety. Their sex, described discreetly, is a kind of performance art. The two women rendezvous in Irving’s turret, both menstruating. The ballerina smears blood on her own hip as Jin, an old burn wounded and then soothed, snaps away. “You’re like a wild thing at a kill,” Lidija tells her. “Stained in triumph.”
’Tis the season for outré novels of marital malcontent among the creative class. But all three in this triangle have had to compromise in order to get along in mainstream America.
Lidija, who like Jin is Korean, changed her name from Iseul (Kwon supplies the Korean lettering for this and other words) at age 5 to sound more Slavic. Philip, though he would “pass as being white,” as Lidija points out, was born Felipe in Spain. And Jin has suppressed longing to be hurt sexually, knowing it conforms to a stereotype of Asian women as “pliant, subject. Ill-used and glad of it.”
Philip, moreover, is not a fan of kink, the theme of a short-fiction anthology Kwon co-edited in 2021. As another song goes — he’s vanilla, baby. And speaking of babies, though the couple agreed from the outset of their relationship not to have children, he’s changed his mind. “It’s the scent,” he says with bafflement, sniffing a friend’s infant’s head.
The trio argues about gradations of racism, and the boundaries of art. (“If I’m hollering, it isn’t ballet,” Lidija insists. “It might be art. But it’s just not ballet.”) We’re asked to envision a lot of avant-garde creations; tons of triptychs and tableaus. Philip describes a movie of a dancer yelpingly en pointe on the lid of a piano with knives strapped to her feet, as the original Little Mermaid felt.
Jin once imagined that she was born “as a partial fish,” Lidija compares her own flaking sunburned skin to fish scales, and they discuss fish folk tales. I’m not sure entirely what to make of this, except that fish are beautiful, fragile creatures with significance in religion.
Complicating matters further is the ghost of a kisaeng, a Korean courtesan, who supposedly died alongside a firstborn son far back in Jin’s lineage, when she was not allowed to marry. According to family lore, this spirit has the power to destroy relationships. Between chapters she tells Jin what really happened to her, in little spritzes of sarcasm and profanity. “Oh, it’s like a dragon’s tail, oh, how will I fit it in?” she mocks the rich old men who took her to bed.
“Exhibit” is quite short: barely over 200 pages, and sometimes I did wish the kisaeng, full of vim though she is, would haunt another novel so I could get back to what was going on with Jin and Lidija and Philip and Irv.
An English-speaking reader doesn’t need a Korean dictionary beside the book, though she might occasionally need an English one. A polemic accusing Jin of blasphemy is not thrown in the trash but “shied.” After being hit with a riding crop and forced to eat olives and currants off a floor — “Exhibit” is a feast of various food and drink — Jin feels her flesh “floresced.” Kwon stretches and pauses the language to its outer limits, as if in a series of tendus and arabesques.
Chunks of her prose could also be torn out and put in a poetry book, no problem. On fame: “I knew it to be pyrite dross, a tinsel jinx.” Nude swimmers are “blue nereids, plume-tailed.” As much as commas, Kwon favors semicolons, which Kurt Vonnegut infamously called “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing”; if so, her novel is not just an exploration of BDSM in contemporary relationships, but a transvestite hermaphrodite convention, to which one is both privileged and perhaps slightly puzzled to receive an all-access pass.
“Exhibit” is a highly sensory experience, awash in petals and colors, smells and flavors, that adds to the literature on a proclivity much discussed and often misunderstood. It lingers like a mysterious, multihued bruise.
EXHIBIT | By R.O. Kwon | Riverhead | 224 pp. | $28
