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Journalism of Courage
South Korean novelist You-jeong Jeong has long been regarded as one of the leading purveyors of psychological crime fiction, a reputation that has earned her comparisons to both Stephen King and Gillian Flynn, though her sensibility is icier.
Her success abroad has grown steadily through English translations of The Good Son and Seven Years of Darkness, each praised for their clinical dissections of family life gone awry. Perfect Happiness, translated by Sean Lin Halbert, extends Jeong’s fascination with domestic worlds where affection and menace coexist. In this thrilling excursion, Jeong has “put a zipper” on the villain’s mouth to focus entirely on the destructive ripple effects of a narcissist, rather than the psychology behind her actions.
Rather than offering access to the troubled mind of Yuna Shin, a mother, sister, and wife whose fixation on perfection blooms into violence, Jeong positions her protagonist at a distance. Yuna never speaks for herself. The reader encounters her only through the voices of those suffocated by her presence: Eun-Ho, the second husband who tiptoes around her moods; Jane, the estranged sister who escaped years earlier; and Jiyoo, the six-year-old daughter already calibrating her life around danger.
It is a daring choice, one that aligns with Jeong’s broader project as an author, examining the impact of monstrosity rather than the melodrama of its creation. It also reflects Jeong’s stated interest in exploring how one person’s pursuit of “perfect happiness” can obliterate the happiness of many others.
The gamble pays off most convincingly in the sections narrated by Eun-Ho. His voice reveals the incremental self-erasure of a man who believes that compliance is safer than resistance. Halbert’s translation skillfully maintains the muted, worn-down cadence of someone accustomed to swallowing truth. His rationalisations accumulate into a portrait of a man hollowed out by fear. It is Jeong at her best. She is unwilling to absolve her characters of their complicity.
Jane, Yuna’s older sister, provides the novel’s bite. Raised in a household where Yuna absorbed all maternal affection, Jane learned early that love could be rationed, weaponised, withheld. Her chapters crackle with resentment sharpened over years of distance.
As Jeong deftly moves between past and present, she shows how childhood hierarchies calcify into adult estrangement. Jane understands Yuna’s capacity for harm better than anyone, yet even she resists acknowledging the full extent of it. Jeong uses Jane to underscore how long-term exposure to narcissism warps a person’s understanding of what love should feel like.
Jeong’s most impressive achievement, however, lies in her portrayal of Jiyoo. Child narrators are often overburdened with precocity, but Jiyoo is rendered instead with sensory clarity and emotional opacity. She listens for the tremor in her mother’s voice, monitors silences, studies door hinges and footsteps. Halbert’s translation preserves this delicate balance, letting the child speak simply while the horror seeps in around the edges. In one of the book’s most haunting sequences, Yuna brings Jiyoo and her ex-husband to a secluded cabin at Half Moon Marsh. Through Jiyoo’s fragmentary memories, Jeong constructs a nightmare whose terror derives from the child’s uncomprehending dread.
Yet the same structural choice that allows these viewpoints to shine eventually hampers the novel’s momentum. Because Jeong refuses to enter Yuna’s mind, the narrative must circle her from the outside, returning repeatedly to the same emotional and informational terrain. Eun-Ho’s suspicion, Jane’s guarded fury, Jiyoo’s fear, each is convincing, but each also risks redundancy as the plot advances. The absence of Yuna’s perspective is meant to deprive the reader of explanatory comfort but it also deprives the novel of complexity. By keeping Yuna entirely offstage psychologically, Jeong limits the narrative.
The greatest challenge is Yuna herself. A character who exerts such gravitational pull over every life she touches should have felt dynamic. Instead, Yuna becomes strangely predictable. Jeong hints at a larger cultural critique of the contemporary obsession with happiness as a measurable, curatable achievement. But the novel stops short of threading those insights meaningfully into Yuna’s psyche. She embodies these anxieties without illuminating them. What remains is a chilling but occasionally static portrait of domestic horror. Jeong remains a master of atmosphere: the sterility of Yuna’s home, the menace of the marsh, the calm before each emotional strike.
Perfect Happiness is engrossing, unsettling, and marked by moments of genuine brilliance. It also reveals the limits of Jeong’s most provocative structural choice. By refusing to give her villain a voice, she forces the narrative to orbit a character who never fully comes into focus. The result is a thriller that is psychologically acute in its depiction of victims, but thinner than expected in its understanding of the perpetrator they fear.
In Yuna Shin, Jeong has birthed a chilling reminder of what can happen when someone decides that a flawless life requires the elimination of anything, and anyone, that disrupts it.
‘Perfect Happiness by You-jeong Jeong
India Penguin
488 pages
₹599
