Tangled themes of violence and masculinity run like buried cables through Chang-rae Lee’s work. One of contemporary American literature’s major chroniclers of manhood, he’s been writing for three decades about assimilation, suburban alienation, and the mystery of how his characters survive loneliness and, often, shocking loss. Lee uses his careful prose to sink slowly and deeply into the minds of men who resist thinking about their feelings, even as they ruminate obsessively about their past griefs. His new novel, A Tender Age, would belong in this meditative lineage, except that its narrator, a middle-aged man named Jeon-Gi, doesn’t resist emotion in the slightest. He’s as sensitive to—and as fascinated by—its lingering effects as his creator is. And unlike some of Lee’s earlier protagonists, this character wants to know himself. Jeon-Gi opens the book by confessing that he’s consumed by the “nature of certain youthful happenings, how they can become a knot in the flesh that every other occurrence must bypass in order for you to know yourself.” He then recounts, in vivid detail, the events …