I read the new Susan Choi novel in five long sittings, each of which produced a storm cloud of indecision. Had Choi penned, as often seemed possible, the worst serious book in recent memory, an overwrought parody of self-conscious “MFA fiction”? Or was Flashlight a flawed but sometimes brilliant international saga, occasionally losing its thread, yes, but asking and answering momentous questions?
That I still haven’t decided a week later says much about the state in which Flashlight is likely to leave readers. The follow-up to 2019’s slippery Trust Exercise, Choi’s new release is expansive, cinematic, and badly in need of editing. Whereas its National Book Award-winning predecessor demanded a puzzle-solver’s attention, Flashlight requires nothing so much as the page-turner’s dogged resolve. More than once, as its plot unspooled, I declared its main character, Louisa Kang, to be the least likable literary protagonist since Patrick Bateman, the cannibal-necrophiliac who narrates American Psycho. Yet Louisa’s resolution left me deeply moved. Perhaps the answer is that Choi is too talented, too inventive a storyteller, to write a truly unredeemable novel. But if Flashlight is the best she can now come up with, her career will increasingly be spoken of in the past tense.
Like much literary fiction today, Flashlight melds the personal and the geopolitical, aware that the nuances of “identity” are best explored with a map in hand. Unlike most of its contemporaries, the novel is so resistant to summary that one hardly knows which chunk to break off first. Broadly speaking, the book is about the Kang family, a father, mother, and daughter whose paths lead from Michigan to Japan to Los Angeles to darker realms beyond. Yet it is also a thriller, travelogue, and bildungsroman. Whenever one thinks it has settled in place, the book flies off again to other decades, continents, subgenres, and concerns.
One incident anchors the rest of Choi’s plotting. On a summer evening in 1978, father Serk, an ethnic Korean with an American green card, is walking on a Japanese beach with his 10-year-old daughter, Louisa. In a mystery that will not be solved until midway through the book, Serk vanishes, leaving Louisa frozen and half-drowned on the sand. Though other narratives vie for space, among them Louisa’s embittered adolescence and mother Anne’s impoverished widowhood, Serk’s disappearance is the engine that powers the story’s machinery. The chapters written from his perspective provide not only a thrum of suspense but the vast majority of the novel’s most compelling pages.
In part, this is due to the inherent fascination that Serk’s life is likely to provoke. Also useful is Choi’s clearly voluminous research, which grounds and textures the young man’s heartrending history. The son of Korean immigrants to Japan, Serk grows up in the chaotic years after the empire’s dissolution, ambitious but stateless and determined to succeed. If his winding journey to America and back is engrossing, even better are the decades that follow his seeming disappearance. Though I will not spoil where Serk goes and why, students of East Asian statecraft will not be particularly surprised.
It is an unlucky coincidence that Choi’s best material has already been covered by two of the finest novels of the 21st century. The first, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (2017), is a gorgeous meditation on the Korean experience in Japan, a narrative so perfectly sustained that it might have been written in a single longhand flourish. The second, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), is a thrilling and nightmarish saga of life above the 38th parallel. Not for nothing does Choi give Johnson’s book a research acknowledgement in her closing pages.
Even at its best, Flashlight fails to reach the heights of either of these masterworks. Indeed, one wonders if Choi’s long American digressions — Louisa at college in New England, Anne gathering dust in Los Angeles — represent a concession that her book must do something, anything, to break different ground. The problem is that neither female character is especially engaging, nor do the pair inspire the insightful interior writing on which domestic realism depends. Anne, stricken with multiple sclerosis, spends much of the book bedbound and passive, an uncomplaining victim of her daughter’s emotional abuse. Louisa, meanwhile, is a near-sociopathic thief, bully, and scold. To read her (many) sections of the novel is to encounter a figure so thoughtlessly amoral that one could almost reach inside the book and shake her into civility.
The reader may argue that I am imposing a discredited standard — or, worse, a superfluous one. Does The Scarlet Letter contain likable characters? Does Hamlet? Such a retort, though smartly conceived, ignores the fact that Choi doesn’t even begin to explain Louisa’s curious lack of empathy. Take, for example, this passage from Louisa’s point of view: “What bad result came when you stole, apart from people just making a fuss?” Or this one: “When her mother in the course of attempting to grab her own hair dropped the oval barrette to the floor, as almost always happened, Louisa would pretend she hadn’t seen, would punish her mother by forcing her to ask her to please pick it up.” Or this one: “With unerring instinct, if not understanding, she adopted [her friends’] nonchalant scorn.” Though the phrase “generational trauma” will surely turn up in reviews of Choi’s latest, the author does almost nothing to link Louisa’s misbehavior to her distressing past. It simply exists, an unpleasant fait accompli that makes time spent in the young woman’s company feel like time wasted.
Nor, it must be said, are Flashlight’s sentences as frictionless as the reader might want. Too often, Choi resorts to the strained and overwritten prose that one associates with graduate programs in creative writing. (Choi went to Cornell’s.) For every moment of precision (“Louisa’s aunt was like a bright light Louisa couldn’t turn off”), we get two or three sentences that demand painstaking contemplation, such is their labyrinthine build. Because these offenders are often more than a hundred words long, I will not quote them here. Suffice it to say that phrases such as “the sinuous thread of Christiane’s cigarette smoke” are far less bewitching when one encounters them at the end of paragraph-length run-ons.
Damning blemishes, all. Yet Flashlight is never quite a disaster. Presented on their own, in fact, the book’s Serk chapters might have made a beautiful and harrowing novella, a form neglected by American authors to their harm. Somewhere at Farrar, Straus and Giroux or the Steven Barclay Agency, a low-level grunt must have suggested just such an excision and been rebuffed. Anonymous sir or madam, I dedicate this review to you.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.