“All the World Can Hold” by Jung Yun.
“All the World Can Hold” by Jung Yun.A. Scott/S&S/37 Ink
In the week following al-Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001, a dome of high pressure brought clear skies and crisp air to the Northeast, blue-and-gold mornings in Brooklyn, whine of fighter jets overhead, a column of smoke. Ash dusted streets and roofs. Crowds laid wreaths on the Promenade, across the harbor from the World Trade Center, and photos of the missing appeared outside subway stations: Last Seen on the 104th floor of the North Tower.
Soon the wounded city sprang back to life. Trains and buses circulated throughout the boroughs. People returned to offices. After a shutdown, the New York Stock Exchange clanged its bell, ready for business. Jung Yun captures that grief and resolve in her witty, wrenching “All the World Can Hold,” both a rollicking yarn and a shrewd send-up of American culture. She opens her novel on Sunday, September 16, not in New York but in Boston, where an aging cruise ship, the Sonata, is about to embark on a five-day excursion to Bermuda. The vessel was scheduled to depart from Manhattan until history had intervened. (Yun bases “All the World Can Hold” on an actual cruise she took that September.)
The novel’s cruise has a theme: it features cast members from “Starlight Voyages,” a (fictional) “Love Boat” clone that ran for nine seasons in the 1970s and ‘80s. Doug Clayton played the kind-hearted, flirtatious bartender; now sixty-two, he’s a Hollywood has-been desperate for a buck and coerced into a reunion project by his addled agent. His sweet-tempered nephew, Gideon, tags along. Tom and Franny, power lawyers in the financial district, booked their trip months earlier to celebrate Franny’s Korean mother’s chilsun, or seventieth birthday, also paying for Franny’s deadbeat musician brother and his girlfriend. They’re hardly in a festive mood. (Tom seeks information but the ship’s satellite link and internet are down; Blackberries and Motorola cell phones are useless.) Lucy, a young Black woman just finishing her computer science doctorate from MIT, mulls a job opportunity at a start-up with the goofy name of Google.
Each day offers a range of activities on the Lido deck and elsewhere. Booze pours freely in the Grotto, the ship’s bar. “The glittery faux rock walls, the waterfall spilling out into the indoor lagoon, the boulder-shaped speakers piping in soft island Muzak,” Franny observes. “More people are starting to filter in, dressed in bright floral shirts and billowy caftans that graze the floor.” She swills the drinks as she plans her mother’s catered party. Lucy stews in resentment when her roommate, Mariah, plunges into an affair with an Australian crew member. Franny learns that Tom’s obsession with New York’s tragedy may have darker implications. And Doug, a sober alcoholic, struggles with self-loathing and a delicate recovery: “Now he goes to silent meditation and meditation retreats, and takes long, solitary hikes in the Santa Monica Mountains. He reminds himself that it’s better this way. He’s not convinced people are good for him and he’s certain that he’s no good for people.”
The Sonata is a seafaring version of “The Truman Show,” an exercise in artifice. Passengers are assigned to dining tables where they chat with strangers, fussed over by waiters. The staff sees to their needs — meals, laundry, shoeshine services — while wearing tags printed with names and native countries: Indonesia, Estonia, the United Kingdom. Something’s off: Doug mulls whether the communication black-out is deliberate, obscuring the scale of 9/11: “That is the one thing the crew clearly doesn’t want the passengers talking about at the risk of ruining their collective good time. It dawns on him that maybe there’s nothing wrong with the satellite link at all.” Once the ship docks in Bermuda, its passengers are assailed by nonstop coverage. They distract themselves with scuba and catamaran adventures, walks on beaches.
Yun is a sharp-eyed, subtle writer. She knows we’re addicted to screens, from iPhones to laptops to televisions, and scripts her plot just so. The novel’s a kind of sitcom by design, and its pace occasionally lags. Flashbacks don’t always fit within the flow, as with Franny’s recollection of the South Tower’s collapse. Yet amid the Sonata’s mai tais and cooking workshops Yun has crafted allegories of race and class, dissonances that mark our nation and its moving pieces. It’s convenient — and very American — for the Sonata’s passengers to block the horror they left over the horizon; there’s too much fun to be had, too many flambeau desserts on the menu.
Yun’s satire recalls recent fiction by Caroline O’Donoghue and Claire Lombardo, rage stirring beneath a breezy story. Doug craves authenticity but feels deceived; his “tux, a rental from a wedding store in L.A., smells like a toxic blend of dry-cleaning chemicals and plastic — something he didn’t notice until he unzipped the flimsy garment bag it came in just minutes before dinner.”
Are we to blame for our naïveté and self- absorption? This question animates “All the World Can Hold,” underscoring Yun’s skills. As towers again burn, as sirens blare and missiles hurl across the Middle East, we must ask whether our escapism, the American default setting, is worth it.
Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.”
ALL THE WORLD CAN HOLD
By Jung Yun
37 Ink, 352 pages, $30