Susan Choi’s ‘Flashlight’ Is Gorgeous

Ten-year-old Louisa is walking on a beach on the Japanese coast at night with her father, a cantankerous college instructor named Serk. It’s 1978. They’ve left their sandals near a staircase leading to the village where they’ve been staying. Decades in the future, Louisa recalls the feeling of damp sand beneath her bare feet.

Or does she? Louisa will wonder what from these recollections is real and what has been grafted from some other time, some other beach, onto what turned out to be a fateful evening. The next morning, Serk has vanished — drowned, it’s supposed — and Louisa is found unconscious on the shore. She retains an image of the flashlight he carried falling “almost noiselessly in sand,” though not as “a memory, as Louisa understood memory … This wasn’t something but nothing, an absence where a presence was expected.”

Serk’s disappearance, and the black hole of uncertainty surrounding it, are the subject of Susan Choi’s prickly, gorgeous new novel, Flashlight. Choi has been on the memory beat for some time. In Trust Exercise, a 2019 National Book Award winner set at an elite performing-arts high school, she explored how such a hothouse of creativity — where adults treat teenage theater students as the grown-ups they’re only pretending to be — could enable a culture of sexual predation, delving into not just abuse itself but also the fallibility of memory, how old traumas reverberate. Although Me Too influenced the reception of Trust Exercise, its signal achievement was less its timeliness than its ingenious construction: Each of the book’s three sections upset basic information imparted previously, making for a reading experience as destabilizing as it was enthralling.

Trust Exercise was built like a steel trap, with prose and plotting so finely honed it lacerated. Flashlight is bigger and looser, spanning multiple continents and more than half a century. Following a prologue describing the episode by the sea, Choi brings us back to Serk’s childhood — only here he’s called Hiroshi, born in Japan to Korean parents. They return to calling him by his given name, Seok, after the war. But as ethnic Koreans, they are still considered second-class citizens, and they decamp to North Korea, lured by promises of a communist paradise. Their son moves to the U.S. to pursue doctoral studies, and an already bifurcated identity becomes trifurcated: “Seok” morphs into “Serk,” a man unwilling to talk about his origins even with Anne, the white woman he marries.

Through his sister, Serk learns that his parents plan to visit Japan — so when an opportunity arises to teach there and reunite with them, he ambivalently takes it. Arriving in the place of her father’s birth, Louisa is initially ill at ease but, with a child’s adaptability, she quickly figures out how to behave. Sort of. “She felt Japanese,” Choi writes. “It was as if she’d stepped into a movie and was doing so well in her role that no one else knew she was only pretending.” In Louisa’s eyes, a major factor inhibiting her life in Japan is her white American mother, who rarely leaves their apartment owing to a mysterious physical ailment — and, when she does, stands out as the most obviously different among their family trio.

Characterized, like Louisa’s memories, by what’s absent as much as by what’s present, Flashlight is obsessed with what we know and what we don’t, what we keep from one another, and what we keep from ourselves — and the stakes of all this alienation. Resenting Anne’s condition, Louisa displays a child’s reaction to a parent’s weakness, a dynamic both parties, in regular circumstances, might outgrow. But Serk’s disappearance forecloses that possibility. The disconnection that afflicts this family is not just interpersonal but geopolitical. Serk can vanish so easily because he’s effectively stateless, neither fully American nor Japanese nor Korean.

The book’s title is its governing metaphor: There are no moments of total illumination here, just a beam shining briefly on a target before scanning restlessly onward. About halfway through, we get big news about Serk’s fate, which some old-fashioned decorum prevents me from revealing, though I’m not sure it’s even meant to be a surprise. It’s fairly clear from the beginning where things are headed; that this outcome is obvious but unspoken further unsettles our sense of what we know and how we know it. The great mystery of Flashlight isn’t so much what happened as why, the concatenation of secrets, silences, and unlikely geopolitical inputs that leads to a family’s dissolution. As the years pass, both Anne and Louisa harbor doubts about what transpired that night in Japan, though neither is able to really articulate them.

In some ways, Flashlight recalls Choi’s 2008 novel, A Person of Interest, in which suspicion for a series of Unabomber-like attacks falls on a man named Lee, an immigrant from an unspecified Asian country whose resemblances to Serk approach the amusingly specific: Both are dyspeptic academics living in the Midwest whose white wives shop for cold cuts at a certain deli, teach their daughters to swim against their husbands’ anxious objections, and ultimately develop a fatal or disabling illness. (Choi grew up partly in Indiana, her father a Korean-born mathematics professor, her mother a Jewish secretary; the family spent time in Japan that marked a dramatic rupture. “After Japan, everything changed,” Choi wrote in a 2018 essay.) The earlier work is also a story of aftermath. Lee’s time as the titular “person of interest” provokes him to reflect on his late wife. It’s a complicated relationship that ends, before her death, in divorce — but the reader gets a real sense of spark, a vigor that survives the marriage and remains credibly alive for decades within Lee.

A similar establishing cohesion might have been useful among the three-person family that is, in the end, Flashlight’s central unit — but, mostly skipping the tender moments, Choi briskly characterizes Serk and Anne’s marriage as a “decade of unease.” Serk holds no monopoly on secrets: Anne has a son from a previous relationship, whose discovery by Louisa contributes to her distrust of her mother. Anne appears less and less as Flashlight progresses, but she’s a blazingly realized character whenever she’s present: thorny, brilliant, by turns diffident and forthright, a frustrated seeker who’s clear-eyed about the compromises she has made — and the compromises that have been demanded of her — even if not fully comfortable with them.

If Flashlight marks a return to earlier thematic concerns after the swerve that was Trust Exercise, one thing that hasn’t changed is what an outlandishly talented writer Choi is, her prose possessing an iron confidence in its own beauty. She favors complex, lightly punctuated sentences whose payoff comes late. Choi’s analysis of her characters’ emotional experiences is so eloquent that it can hinder — I sometimes wished she would leave more room for readers to interpret, even misinterpret, her characters and their actions, rather than so fluently laying it all out. Much of the thrill of Trust Exercise was that it didn’t just take the ambiguities of memory as its subject — by ceding so much of the floor to its messed-up characters, it inscribed those ambiguities into its very structure.

At the same time, Trust Exercise was direct in its indirection; as soon as you hit the book’s second section, you knew something was afoot. What propels Flashlight is a more ambient sense that not everything is as it seems, enhanced by an unnerving series of doubles and echoes. Choi seems to be exploring, if subtly, the limitless number of paths a person can take, the manifold consequences of choices that seem inconsequential, the ways interpersonal disputes can widen into irretrievable losses, the awkward intersections of agency and fate: If only this, if not for that. The book’s many omissions are challenging at times. But Choi is a writer who can be trusted to have a plan, and she sews the narrative up with a conclusion that’s almost impossibly heartbreaking — about which the less said the better. Some things you can see coming from miles away. But life, we’re reminded, retains its ability to surprise.