Complicating the tidy moral boxes of a straightforward infidelity story, Exhibit takes an expansive view of the things that women are punished for wanting. At times, the sheer ferocity of Jin’s desire is uncomfortable to read. But the novel doesn’t demand a reader’s approval of Jin’s cheating; whether she is justified in hurtling toward her urges matters less than the spectacle of her craving. Searching and introspective, Exhibit reflects some of the same social issues that Kwon has addressed in her nonfiction—the stigmatization of kink, the complexities of queerness, and the constant, destabilizing threat of violence against Asian women. Kwon presents these concepts as barriers to self-discovery: Jin’s clandestine journey teaches her, in part, how to want ... No matter what becomes of the affair, though, Jin will emerge a different version of herself. Having ached for so long, she’s transformed by the thrill—and peril—of getting what she wants. Exhibit’s unflinching portrayal asks what we might learn from confronting some of the reasons for her stasis. Jin’s misdeeds are fictional, but the societal constraints she faces exist well outside the novel’s pages.
Hypnotic and sometimes perplexing ... Kwon stretches and pauses the language to its outer limits, as if in a series of tendus and arabesques ... Exhibit is a highly sensory experience, awash in petals and colors, smells and flavors, that adds to the literature on a proclivity much discussed and often misunderstood. It lingers like a mysterious, multihued bruise.
Kwon is a deeply sensual writer, and Jin’s throbbing but tentative lust comes out in other ways, as in this passage suffused with food ... Where Lispector’s work featured an intense stream of consciousness, Kwon is reserved; she doesn’t give her reader any more than what’s required, and Exhibit is brief, at just about 200 pages. This kind of writing can disguise an athletic literary talent. The idea of a divided self, a way of half-living, defines this book.
Intimate ... Ends blurrily ... Some readers might sour at the inconclusive ending. But in my mind, nothing is more appropriate for a novel about religion’s hauntings, about religion and art and desire overrunning language and all its forms, including the novel. Kwon understands that these stories cannot have clean endings because something always escapes the telling. We end up silent, tense, gesturing, pointing.
Both thematically and technically, Kwon’s writing is consistently precise and polished. Her word selection is that of a poet (so many short vowels and sharp consonants) and her vocabulary is that of a scholar ... Cumulatively, the narrative unfurls with recurring images. Not because of the author’s preoccupation with specific (and unanswerable) questions, but because each sentence is a string, woven into a rope—a rope intricately knotted so that specific elements are visible in multiple places inside the broader structure ... displays, in stark relief, the patterns created by what we repress, what we celebrate, and how we transform shame into joy: it’s exquisitely curated and terrifically complicated.
Kwon creates stark sentences elevated by exquisite vocabulary—fiat, mirific, Icarian, sluing. Spare pages belie a dense narrative exploring identity, sexuality, religion, and parenthood ... In spite of many notable elements, Exhibit is more show than indelible art.
A female friendship takes on mythological and tragic dimensions in the haunting sophomore novel ... Hypnotic and disquieting, this slow burn will stick in readers’ minds.
In a book all about image and presentation, the baroque sentences make conceptual sense. But at the level of plot, the writing is often clipped and elliptical, withholding a great deal when it comes to action. Like overexposed photographs, this strategy is both luminescent and obfuscating: It can be hard to see to the heart of the matter. Nevertheless, Kwon’s novel is a muscular and intelligent examination of the layers of Jin’s identity. A bold, tough novel that invites the viewer’s gaze and stares defiantly back.
