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A Novel
by Susan Choi
Book Reviewed by:A novel tracing a father's disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He's carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family's catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne's illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
What really happened to Louisa's father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there's so much we can't see?
Seok
At last he goes to school.
He's been waiting. He can't remember a time he wasn't waiting, the same way he can't remember a time he couldn't read. The ones that make simple sounds and the ones that are entire pictures, ideas. The first time he ever saw a book was when he entered the schoolroom, a place he views as his but heretofore unreasonably withheld from him. The orderliness, the discipline, the ever-changing chalked strings of words instead of just the same street signs that never say anything new. The glorious singing and shouting, the fierce battling in the dusty schoolyard against dummies of scrap wood or sacking and husks, the inordinate amount of time spent tending vegetables in the garden, learning to use different tools including the almost-as-tall-as-you shovel, helping out the old men at the docks to coil their ropes by running the rope dizzyingly in a tiny circle because your arms are too short to do it any other way, in other words every kind of activity besides ...
Choi's novel is about the general impact of family secrets and trauma, and also specifically about Korean history and Korean culture loss. Despite its premise, Flashlight is less suspense-driven than a reader might expect, and more closely resembles straightforward literary fiction than Choi's National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise (2019). But it's a big swing with bold implications. Choi is relentless in her depiction of the necessarily violent consequences of borders, not just when it comes to the more obvious examples, like the complicity of global powers in North Koreans' isolation, but in less expected ways. Flashlight amply displays Choi's stellar writing through a variety of moods and subjects, though it lacks a dynamism that could have been achieved through greater intentionality...continued
Full Review
(926 words)
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls
In a brilliant feat of storytelling, both intimate and sweeping, Susan Choi has created a profoundly moving epic that blends a tender family portrait with a haunting examination of the Korean diaspora. Flashlight is that rare novel that has everything I want in fiction: gorgeous writing, fascinating characters I fell in love with, an immersive, addictive story with an ending that made me gasp, then cry. I'm in awe. Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood
In this superbly crafted book, the fraught geopolitics of family life―the official secrets, the acts of espionage, the diplomatic failures―are set against the intimacies, grievances, conflicting memories, and unmet needs of national allegiance. Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last. Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House
Flashlight is instantly bewitching: a mysterious family tragedy whose solution reaches beyond psychology into geopolitics. Susan Choi's fictional investigation reveals a writer at the height of her spectacular powers.
In Susan Choi's Flashlight, main character Seok, later referred to as Serk, spends his childhood with his Korean family in Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea. He attends a Japanese school, where he speaks and learns to write Japanese. He believes he is Japanese until the occupation ends, leading to a humorous and emotionally brutal exchange with his family that is illustrative of what Korean people, at home and abroad, lost during this period of enforced Japanese language and schooling:
"But what's Korea?" he asked as they turned to walk home.
"Let me die," Auntie Kim said.
"Korea is the homeland of Koreans," his mother told him.
"But what are Koreans?"
"We are," said his mother. "You are. That's why your name isn't really...
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