Tuesday, February 20, 2001 - Los Angeles Daily News

Chang's latest: not what readers expect?

By Bernadette Murphy
Correspondent

Leonard Chang is used to straddling different worlds.

The novelist lives in the Bay Area but teaches in the graduate writing program at Antioch University in Marina del Rey. He's gained a reputation as a literary novelist -- a writer's writer -- from his earlier two novels, but his most recent offering is a noir crime thriller, "Over the Shoulder: A Novel of Intrigue" (Ecco Press), that on first glance seems to have more in common with pulp fiction than high literary art.

Though Chang is slight of stature and fairly quiet, a man who appears to prefer the silence of his work space to more public venues, his main character is a tough-guy security professional who takes daring chances. As a Korean-American writer who could have capitalized on the ethnic perspective of his work to carve a place for himself in this age of multicultural literature, Chang purposefully chose the opposite: His main character is more American than Korean, more usual than exotic.

Chang sees nothing antithetical about these choices. "I wrote the kind of book I so wanted to read but couldn't find," he says, "a novel that dealt with people who looked like me and dealt with issues I was concerned about -- understanding the past and families."

The plot of his new novel reads like a high-speed chase into worlds at once familiar and foreign. The thriller features Allen Choice as a security professional who guards a computer industry executive in Silicon Valley. When Allen's partner is murdered under mysterious circumstances, he teams up with a Bay Area reporter to solve the crime. Allen doesn't go searching for his roots as much as he stumbles upon the secrets and lies of his past, including his tenuous ties to the Korean-American community -- some severed, others holding -- as he tries to solve the crime. Ultimately, he encounters the unexpected truth about the death of his father some 20 years earlier.

The result is a book that is distinct, alive with the unexpected, and always engaging. Some of his readers, though, were disappointed that he didn't play up the "ethnic angle" to a greater degree, Chang says. "They wanted more exoticism and otherness -- they wanted, essentially, confirmation of their stereotypical perceptions of Korean America, and of course, I wouldn't and couldn't accommodate them."

Chang didn't write a book limning a prototypical Korean-American experience. Rather, he explains "it's the experience of anyone who is different by color, size, speech -- anything."

The choice to write a noir thriller is another seeming contradiction, though he explains that the distinction between noir and literature is a false one.

In noir fiction, "there's a sense of infinite gradations of good and evil, with every character possessing the capacity for both." As such, anti-heroes can hold our sympathies and antagonists reveal moral uncertainties, all of which resists easy classification. His work in "Over the Shoulder" adapts some of these elements, but primarily, he says, "I wanted to get at that sensibility of alienation, of the main character feeling isolated and separated from the mainstream."

Though noir fiction has often been ignored by the literary establishment, Chang says the situation is different now. "There's a reevaluation going on: Those 'pulp' writers are suddenly being recognized as artists in their own right, working miracles within narrow parameters."

Even in choosing noir as his palette, though, Chang sticks to the confines of genre only so far. Instead of setting his story in Los Angeles -- "the capital of noir" -- he selected Silicon Valley. And instead of focusing on the entertainment industry and mob-type intrigue common in noir fiction, he selected the computer industry, thereby updating the form. When writing the book, he explains, the Silicon Valley boom was going on, and he realized that executive protection tended to focus more on wealthy technology executives -- an aspect that heightened the separation between his main character and the world in which he found himself.

"Allen was a protector of a world he knew nothing about. There was also tremendous wealth being created, of which Allen had no part. This emphasized his alienation from his work, those around him, his entire way of life."

Though Chang had initially set the story in Los Angeles, transplanting the plot to the Bay Area worked well, especially with the ethnic and racial makeup of the cities. Some elements, though, simply spoke to the writer in him. "Looking at those gleaming high-tech towers with the bright blue skies, the neo-noir feel to it was something I just couldn't resist." Currently, he's considering a sequel to "Over the Shoulder" that will be set in Los Angeles.

The bottom line, for Chang, was to create fiction in which he illuminated the complexity of his characters, while also taking great pains with the prose.

"I tried to approach a noir novel as a literary fiction writer would; that is, the importance of character became paramount, and I wanted to make sure the writing was sharp and well-honed. At the same time, I wanted to include those elements of noir fiction that engaged me as a reader and writer," he explains.

This is nothing new, since Raymond Chandler worked to suffuse the mystery form with a lyrical and poetic sensibility. "What I wanted to do, however, also included race and ethnicity, and the search for a truncated familial history."

When asked what brought him to this point in his career, Chang is unusually effusive. "Since it's my third novel, I felt a little more confident about writing it. I also enjoyed this more, since I've long been a fan of crime and noir fiction, and I wanted to distill a lot of my reading into it. There were times when I danced in my chair, amazed that something was happening to my protagonist, and that I was both a writer and reader of this novel."

Leonard Chang will be reading at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Barnes & Noble, 10850 W. Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles; (310) 475-3914. He can be reached through his Web site at www.leonardchang.com.