Y/N by Esther Yi

This is both wildly modern and strangely provincial at the same time. I read this because it was on the New York Times 100 Notable Books list for 2022, and am so glad I did. The tone is set when Masterson, one of several minor characters given excellent Dickensian names, declares, " We no longer go to church once a week; we attend a stadium concert once a year." The anonymous narrator in this book is his sort-of girlfriend, and she has become obsessed with the youngest member of a Korean boy band. He is called, with an inevitable echo of the Unification Church founder, Moon. His oldest bandmate is Sun, of course, with Jupiter, Mercury and Venus rounding out the quintet. Upon hearing that Moon is retiring and leaving his group, the narrator embarks upon a journey to Seoul to find him and ask questions that seem as impossible to answer as they are troubling to her to pose. Interspersed with scenes from the self-insert fanfiction she writes, that uses the moniker “Y/N” or “your name” (NOT yes/no, as I had assumed) to allow a fan to imagine inserting themselves into stories of romantic encounters with the idol of their choice, Yi’s book becomes a heady calibration between the surreal and the banal. This is well worth spending an afternoon reading.