The novel wobbles between manhood and boyhood, clarity and confusion, self-knowledge and a windmilling search for identity by a 10-year-old faced with challenges he’s too young to comprehend. Now, for the first time, Lee traces the concern back to boyhood, a risky move: Young Jeon-Gi’s travails are conventional ones, the fodder of many coming-of-age stories. Naturally, nothing goes quite as he anticipated, and Jeon-Gi, child that he is, loses control in a conflict with Joshua. For the rest of the novel, the young Jeon-Gi is consumed by the question of whether he wants to be scary. The post The Long Tail of Boyhood Swagger appeared first on The Atlantic.