The Choke Artist

Starred review from December 17, 2012
Yoo (Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before) is a gifted YA novelist and comic writer who, by his own recollection, has spent his entire life purposefully underachieving in important moments. From struggles with popularity in kindergarten, to the delicate social battles of high school, to the development of his writing career, Yoo has repeatedly self-sabotaged while on the cusp of potential success. But just as readers are ready to dismiss him as a perennial screw-up, he deftly brings his experiences back to the rawness of his family struggles and he articulates that rarest of memoir experiences: a truly poignant, unexpected epiphany. Yoo shares his stories with candor, and the range of topicsâsexuality, work, sibling rivalry, body image issues, and ethnic identityâmeans readers will never get bored. The essays are well-paced, the delivery is always punchy, and Yoo makes for a sympathetic protagonist. Though at times the themes feel repetitive, it is really more that (like all things in life) his issues overlap. In exorcising these demons, Yoo has crafted a fantastic memoir that will have readers laughing throughout.

May 1, 2012
A portrait of the artist as a glum man. Yoo, the author of two YA novels (Stop Me if You've Heard This One Before, 2008, etc.), presents a painfully honest and strangely unlikable memoir recounting his conflicted feelings about being Asian American--though "conflicted" may be the wrong word, as the emotional tenor here leans precipitously toward flat-out self-hatred. The title refers to the author's strategy of deliberate failure calculated to counter assumptions based on his membership in a "model minority" and the attendant expectations of academic and professional success. This approach led to disastrous consequences in all aspects of his life, including a chronic impotence problem, which is described in copious detail. Yoo paints himself as a dedicated dilettante, haplessly affecting hip-hop cultural signifiers as a teenager, getting through school without distinguishing himself in any way and embracing his status as an anonymous office drone in a successful bid to matter to no one and contribute nothing of significance to the world. There is plenty of rich material here, but Yoo is not a particularly flavorful prose stylist, and his reflexive self-deprecating humor is generically unamusing and further paints him as an unpleasant vortex of insecurity and muffled rage. The author experiences an ironic epiphany late in the narrative when he recognizes that his fiction is hamstrung by unsympathetic characters that exude these traits...the irony being that they also dominate this exploration of his rather pathetic personal history and are not redeemed by any special insight or transformative literary magic. A brave exercise in self-revelation but a decidedly sour, depressing reading experience.

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May 1, 2012
Yoo, author of two successful young-adult novels, now proves himself adept, as well, at the autobiographical essay, as this collection of 10 such pieces amply demonstrates. Set mainly during his college years at Skidmore and the 20 years that follow, the essays offer a self-image as a diffident, self-deprecating, well, choke artist, who is positively gifted at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Yoo is what he wryly calls that rarity, the underachieving Asian-American (he's Korean). This manifests itself in various ways: getting bad grades in school, choosing to lose at tennis while appearing to be trying to win, being the last to learn the truth about his preternaturally cheerful college roommate, etc. The book takes on a poignant air when he writes about his failed relationship with his father and concludes with the most interesting essay in the book, about the frustrations of trying to become a writer while workingalmost permanentlyas a temp! Sometimes a bit slow, this crossover title nevertheless succeeds in its portrait of the author as a young (choke) artist.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)