Native Speaker

The book flashes back to when Henry first met Lelia in El Paso, Texas shortly after finishing an assignment. They’re at a party and hit it off. He can tell she’s curious to know his ethnicity—and sure enough, the conversation eventually turns to the origins of his last name, which is Park. She knows about certain Asian names from an old friend, who told her that names like Chung, Cho, and Lee can either be Korean or Chinese, but not Japanese. Henry affirms that this is true, and then he guesses by her last name—Boswell—that she’s from Massachusetts, which is correct.

Henry and Lelia continue to talk at the party in El Paso. Lelia explains that she delivers food to immigrant families, many of whom don’t speak English. As she unloads the truck, she talks with some of them and gives them impromptu language lessons, so she has started teaching English at nights, and her classroom is always packed with immigrant families.

Eventually, Lelia and Henry decide to go outside to continue their conversation. Henry notes that people like him are constantly worrying about whether or not they have an accent, and Lelia says she can hear this in his voice—he speaks perfectly and without any trace of an accent, but his face makes it obvious that he’s listening closely to himself. He’s paying such close attention, she says, and this reveals to her that he’s a “nonnative speaker.” But Lelia herself speaks in the same careful, deliberate way because, she points out, it’s her job to do so.

Henry and Lelia end up kissing at the party. Their connection is strong—so strong that Henry stays in El Paso for an entire week, even though he was supposed to leave the following day. In the present, though, he wonders if he and Lelia overlooked certain personality traits in each other, rushing into their relationship because it was so electrifying. These days, he walks the streets of New York City and thinks about what she’s doing in Italy. He thinks about the list she left him, wondering what it means and eventually coming to see it as a list not just of his own shortcomings, but of Lelia’s, too.

At work, Henry asks his older colleague, Jack, to tell him about life in the Mediterranean, hoping to get a better sense of what Lelia is doing there. A Greek man, Jack specializes in anything that has to do with the Mediterranean. He tells Henry to go after Lelia, but Pete—another one of his coworkers—points out that Henry isn’t the kind of person to chase after his wife. Rather, he’s the type who would send someone to “tail” her.

Pete talks about how best to follow a woman in public, noting that it’s harder to follow women than it is to follow men, because women are already on alert when they’re in public. As he talks this way, Grace—Henry’s only female coworker—listens but doesn’t chime in. The boss of the company, Dennis Hoagland, then interrupts the conversation. He’s a boisterous man who looks perfectly healthy, but Henry always has the sense that his health is failing. Hoagland is the one who originally recruited Henry for the job, which Henry now describes as a form of spy work, though neither he nor his colleagues think of themselves as spies. Hoagland told him to think of himself as someone who simply “even[s] things out.”

Henry and his coworkers mainly keep track of immigrants who have come to the United States. Each operative concentrates on different groups of people: Jack focuses on the Mediterranean and the Middle East, two other coworkers focus on Central America and Africa, Pete focuses on Japan, and Henry focuses on Korea. Hoagland founded the organization in the 1970s, when there were many immigrants coming to the country—he recognized an opportunity to specialize in a certain kind of surveillance, and now the company gets hired by large corporations, foreign governments, and powerful people.

Dennis Hoagland’s company gives its clients valuable information about “people working against their vested interests.” This information includes contextual details about their lives, psychological assessments, and general intelligence about their daily routines. The people in question are usually wealthy immigrants fueling and supporting revolutions taking place back in their home countries, which sometimes simply means helping to establish various organizations in the United States. Henry and his peers become involved in these organizations and, in doing so, get close to the subjects, endearing themselves to the marks and gleaning whatever information they can from them.