A good story but not great literary fiction - Pachinko

After two days of reading that brought me haltingly to about the 15-percent mark, I recognize that Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel, Pachinko, is a really good novel of a certain type that just isn't my type. She does a great job establishing the main players in what looks to be a multi-generational family saga, beginning in the 1930s in a southernmost Korea fishing village where a young woman devotedly helps her widowed mother run a small boardinghouse for fishermen. A prosperous and dashing Japanese man about twice her age, who travels in and out of the village as a powerful fish wholesaler, is smitten w/ her, pays her elaborate, secret courtship, and eventually she's pregnant. When she tells him, he informs her that he's already married back in Japan but he would be honored to set her up in a nicer house and she could be his Korean mistress. She refuses. One of the key elements in this novel is the tension between Korea and the occupying government of Japan, and I think Lee will develop this further over the course of the work. Eventually, the young woman marries a Christian minister who stays at the boarding house, and the two of them head off for a new life in Osaka. On the plus side, the characters are clearly delineated, Lee keeps the plot moving along at a good pace, and she does an excellent job conveying life in a time and, for most English-language readers, in a place that's largely unfamiliar and seldom if ever depicted in English-language literature. On the down side, the writing is so plain and straightforward that it's bland and unengaging - no real descriptions, nothing lyrical or memorable about the style or phrasing. It's a work that would translate well, I think, into a movie or miniseries, though whether it would be commercially successful is an open question. For those wanting to get lost in a good, long story Pachinko seems like a great choice, but as a work of literary fiction - which I would expect of a National Book Award finalist - it doesn't measure up.