Neotenica is a novel of encounters: casual sex, arranged-marriage dates, cops, rowdy teenagers, lawyers, a Sapphic flirtation, a rival, a child, and two important dogs. At the center of it are Young Ae, a Korean-born ballet dancer turned PhD student, and her husband, a Korean-American male who inhabits an interior femininity, neither transgender nor homosexual, but a strong, visceral femininity nonetheless. This novel is an adrenaline-filled ride sliding across the surface of desire and chance through the quotidian turned playful.
Reviews
Neotenica resists easy codifications. Through their refracting, and converging identities, the characters of Neotenica function in tandem; a warm ball of sweet matter hurtling through space and yearning for the freedom to exist as itself, not as its facsimile.
Lee (Lace Sick Bag) trains a droll, analytical eye on sex, desire, and gender in this delicious avant-garde novella.
Neotenica is a tiny masterpiece. It’s rowdy, alarming, sexy, and gives a deeper exploration of the messy, discursive texture of everyday life. Joon Oluchi Lee has written a novel with such verve and tenderness that you will become obsessed by page one.
Neotenica trolls desire like a twitter thread but it reads with far more presence and vulnerability. This novella, the third work of fiction by Joon Oluchi Lee is a hot read of the mundane as characters encounter one another in details glowing under blacklight. Told in vignettes, the narratives pivot around the only named character: Young Ae, a Korean born ballet dancer and kaleidoscopes through her straight, though gay-cruising, Korean American husband; his hook up; her hook up; a flirtation; a dog; a child. It is a book meant to be answerless and a temperate tangle but the impressions left unearth sensation and possibility through embracing femininity and altering —craft-wise and desire wise—where a climax can be.
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In all, Neotenica presents itself as a balletic maze of grace and wonder in the minutiae; the erotic poetry of the body and its attendant quality of tactility; the sometimes chuckling, stark but never unpleasant, clear-eyed but not vulgar… What remains is a certain glib playfulness and delight in sensation that makes Neotenica unpretentious but uncavalier, light-footed yet unflinching, and genuinely surprising.
A totally original narrative that could perhaps only be published by a dynamic, independent press.
A series of vignettes from the life of a married couple in early 2000s SF. A dainty 100 pages of characters exploring identity & navigating various things like random encounters, casual sex, arranged marriage, public transit. It’s filthy and funny and unexpected and entirely delightful.
Time jumps, characters continually reveal themselves, in equal measure as both mundane and otherworldly and these vignettes move through seemingly random days as one does—doing the laundry, walking with a child, having an orgasm— as if a kind of weightlessness exists in all things. Which is to say that fluidity happens in all things on these small pages, there is a newness around every bend and in the end, I found myself desiring the characters in so many ways—desiring to know them, to be them, to write them, and to leave them, etc. There is a slipperiness in the materiality here and it is alluring.
Neotenica will have you laughing out loud, marveling at the complexities of the human experience, and rethinking what a successful marriage can be. Beauty in this novel can be found in many different forms, it’s deeply affected by the onlooker and only slightly reflective of the actual thing itself. This perspective makes for a compelling image of beauty in Neotenica through Lee’s words.
The style of Neotenica is lithe, funny, lubricious, vital, and determined at the same time. It always takes the most dynamic, stylish, long-way-around.