The Eyes Are the Best Part
Monika Kim’s bold, brutal novel The Eyes Are the Best Part sears with feminine rage and unflinching body horror.
Ji-won is not the perfect first-generation American daughter. She is friendless, average in academics, and lacks the intuitive emotional intelligence of her little sister, Ji-hyun, a quality that their mother claims makes the youngest more Korean. Reeling from the abrupt departure of Ji-won’s father, the women teeter on financial and emotional ruin. In an attempt to cheer up her mother, Ji-won eats a fish eye for the first time—a symbol of good luck. But it awakens an unnatural appetite within her, fueling her mental unraveling. She is left with one obsession: bright blue eyeballs.
Though her coping methods are gruesome, Ji-won has reasons to be angry. Her mother’s new boyfriend is a piggish white man who crashes into their lives with a fetishistic desire for Asian women. Her grades at college are slipping. The possessiveness of her pseudofeminist classmate becomes menacing. Again and again, misogyny and racism pursue her. And all this rage needs somewhere to land.
The world’s assumption that Ji-won is docile makes for good cover as she gives in to her violent impulses, directing them at men in her family and outside of it. In a moment of self-aware disgust, she asks, “Is this what it takes to make our fathers return to us?” Not all of the twists are shocking, but the intensity of Ji-won’s perspective carries the story to satisfying ends, cutting to her red-hot center and daring voyeurs to look away.
The novel The Eyes Are the Best Part bites a chunk out of the horrors of being young and marginalized, licking its lips all the while.
Reviewed by
Luke Sutherland
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