Search dozens of college catalogues, and you won’t find a description of a junior year abroad program that sounds anything like the one Chang-rae Lee’s protagonist experiences in his effervescent novel, MY YEAR ABROAD. Gastronomy, karaoke, yoga, life-enhancing elixirs, financial chicanery, and the delicate relationship between mentor and student are only a few of the subjects Lee tackles with verve, seriousness and considerable wit in his sixth novel.

To call Tiller Bardmon’s travels life-changing doesn’t even begin to describe the upheaval he experiences during the year his father thinks he’s enrolled in a sedate university program in Western Europe. Twenty years old and living in the town of Dunbar, New Jersey, a place that resembles the Princeton where Lee used to teach, Tiller’s life has been scarred by his mother’s abrupt, unexplained abandonment of her family when he was a child. Drifting through an aimless summer, he exudes the feeling that he’s almost waiting for someone to ring a bell, signaling that his real life has begun.

That wakeup call comes in the form of Pong Lou, a Chinese immigrant with a PhD in chemistry, who works for a giant international pharmaceutical company. His entrepreneurial hustle has allowed him to acquire a yogurt shop, an Indian wedding hall, and a sizable portfolio of other profitable businesses in and around Dunbar. Pong is a charismatic figure, who “liked having many pots on many burners, things always developing.” His business successes appear even more impressive to Tiller after he tells the young man, who’s one-eighth Asian, the story of his Chinese childhood. His parents, both respected artists and teachers in Beijing, ran afoul of Mao’s Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Pong and his associate, a compulsive gambler named Lucky Choi, invite Tiller to accompany them on a trip to Asia, where they plan to promote the sale of an Indonesian health tonic known as jamu --- a sort of supercharged smoothie --- under the name “Exilirent.”

"If MY YEAR ABROAD was a theme park attraction, it would be one that we would emerge from feeling a bit dizzy and disoriented, but happy to have hopped on for the ride."

What the intelligent but highly malleable Tiller expects will be a brief interlude that will allow him to simply “stick around Pong, and wait for whatever might develop,” experiencing an “easy-time mixtape of apprenticeship and comradeship, and partnership” before departing for Europe in the fall soon becomes complicated. Traveling in first-class comfort to Honolulu, Shenzhen and Macau, among his most memorable encounters are ones with Drum Kappagoda, a wealthy, seriously ill businessman with a passion for yoga and karaoke who’s the main financial backer for Pong’s venture, and his daughter Constance, who becomes Tiller’s partner in a series of unusual and exhausting sexual escapades. But when Pong departs and his true plans are revealed, Tiller discovers that with his protector gone he’s been punching above his weight.

As if this exuberant tale wasn’t enough, Lee frames Tiller’s picaresque Asian experience with the story of his post-Pong life with an older woman named Val and her eight-year-old son, Victor, Jr., in another New Jersey town Tiller calls Stagno. Val and the boy have entered the witness protection program after she discloses her husband’s dealings with New Jersey-based Tashkentians and an “ISIS offshoot-offshoot.” Victor, Jr. develops an unusual interest in cooking. As word spreads of his preternatural skill, residents of the town begin showing up at the house for impromptu dinners, leaving behind cash donations that grow to a sizable stash for the boy’s college fund. As much as Tiller’s experiences with Pong are a crash course in the ways of the world, the time he spends with Val and Victor, Jr. --- especially in the role of surrogate father --- provides slowly emerging evidence of his growing maturity.

Lee is an accomplished literary performer, and he’s intent on keeping many balls in the air in this novel. Save for the occasional excess of enthusiasm or an overlong scene or two, his juggling act consistently succeeds. In a recent New York Times interview, he says that he “wanted this book to be a bodily experience.” Evoking all the senses, he comes as close to achieving that as is possible to do on the page. In addition to sumptuous meals, there are ribald sexual practices that the word “exotic” doesn’t even begin to describe, two characters more intimately involved in the process of making curry paste than anyone ever would want to be, and even a death by drowning in a vat of mercury.

“I love the sentence. I love singing that song,” Lee said in the Times interview, and this novel’s sentences are as energetic as its plot. The flow of sights, sounds and smells is ceaseless, and Lee sweeps the reader along on a river of ornate, mellifluous prose. Though Tiller is a self-described unreliable narrator, he’s an undeniably affecting one, blending bemusement at the settings in which he finds himself --- from a Macau casino to Drum Kappagoda’s opulent Chinese hideaway to American suburbia at its high and low ends --- with moments of refreshing insight. The novel feels both grounded in something resembling reality and entirely fanciful.

If MY YEAR ABROAD was a theme park attraction, it would be one that we would emerge from feeling a bit dizzy and disoriented, but happy to have hopped on for the ride.