'The Orphan Master’s Son' by Adam Johnson: Review  With the
death of Kim Jong-il all eyes are on the bizarre North Korean
regime, but the best way to understand the country is probably
Adam Johnson’s remarkable new novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son.”
By Taylor Antrim.  Why don’t more novelists write about North
Korea? The morbid fascinations are endless—a police state with
an automaton citizenry, a landscape of Stalinist gulags and
eerily empty superhighways, a (departed) Dear Leader fond of
kidnappings and cognac who famously shot 38 under par on his
first round of golf. Celebrated works of journalism on the DPRK
abound, but the fiction shelf (notwithstanding a few potboiler
thrillers and, ahem, my first novel—about a North Korea-obsessed
boarding-school headmaster) is pretty bare.  Or was. Now there’s
Adam Johnson’s magnificently accomplished, slightly lunatic The
Orphan Master’s Son—which arrives miraculously timed to the news
cycle. With footage of Kim Jong-il’s funeral capturing national
paroxysms of showy