Review: Anthony Domestico on Susan Choi
Susan Choi’s novel begins with actual flashlights, and it goes on restlessly to search the darkness with beams of light and awareness
Because consciousness is hard to describe—how do you define something that is innately subjective?—we often turn to metaphor. Consciousness is a stream (William James), or a “luminous halo” (Virginia Woolf), or a computer (David Dennett). Writing in 1976, the psychologist Julian Jaynes used the figure of a flashlight. Consciousness is “a much smaller part of our mental life” than we assume, he observed. It is like a flashlight searching a dark room for something that does not have any light shining on it. “The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere.” We are surrounded by all that we don’t know, not just in the world but within ourselves, and yet “we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of,” Jaynes asserts. “How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate!”
Susan Choi’s latest novel, Flashlight, begins with two actual flashlights. In the book’s cold opening, an intelligent, difficult ten-year-old girl, Louisa, walks on a Japanese beach with her equally intelligent, equally difficult father, Serk Kang. It’s 1978. The sky is dark, the ocean booms nearby, and Serk, who can’t swim and constantly worries over his daughter’s safety, is protective: “In one hand he holds a flashlight which is not necessary, in the other hand he holds Louisa’s hand which is also not necessary.” The next morning, Louisa is found unconscious on the shore. Her father has vanished without explanation; all Louisa can remember is that “when the flashlight fell, it landed almost noiselessly in sand.” Months later, while meeting with a psychologist to discuss her presumed drowned father, Louisa notices a flashlight on the windowsill. At the session’s conclusion, she surreptitiously pockets it: “She loved this flashlight, and not just because she had stolen it from Dr. Brickner. It was a faithful object. It had been lost, without purpose, before she had snatched it away.”
These aren’t the only actual flashlights to appear in Choi’s novel. When Louisa is a teenager, a frenemy conducts a séance with the aid of a darkened room and a flashlight; in an empty train in North Korea, a security agent “mak[es] his way car to car with a flashlight” past a hiding character. All these flashlights gesture towards the novel’s obsession with what is not known. Why does Louisa remember the flashlight falling noiselessly in the sand but not what happened to her father? Does she remember the flashlight falling? Louisa has a strength of imagination, Choi tells us, that tends to nose in on memory (and then forget the distinction between the two). Likewise, why does Louisa steal the doctor’s flashlight? She has one explanation (the doctor wasn’t using it and she will), but others seem more convincing (teenage mischief; the desire to restore what, and whom, she has lost). Consciousness is a beam of light playing over, but never fully illuminating, our own mental lives and the mental lives of others.
The mystery of what happened to Serk drives the plot of Flashlight, though that makes this baggy novel seem tighter than it is. After hooking us with Serk’s disappearance in the prologue, Choi goes back to his childhood in Japan, where he is known as Hiroshi and believes himself to be Japanese. When World War II ends, his parents reveal that they actually Korean emigrants and he is really named Seok. His parents return to North Korea, from which they send letters swearing that things are going well but asking for seeds, then blankets, then socks. Seok attends graduate school in the United States, where his name is Anglicized to Serk. Eventually Serk, a severe man driven by an “inexhaustible source of grievance that made [him] a permanent traveler,” becomes a professor at a Midwestern college—a fate shared by the narrator of Choi’s 2008 novel A Person of Interest and by her own father—and marries a white American woman named Anne, with whom he has Louisa.
Serk loves his daughter fiercely but fearfully. He won’t read to her because “his accented English antagonized his own ears; he feared to think what would happen to Louisa’s unaccented, effortless English if she had to listen to him more than strictly necessary.” The Kangs are defined by their silences. Serk doesn’t tell Anne about his family in North Korea or the one sister, Soonja, who remained in Japan; Anne doesn’t tell Serk about Tobias, the child she had before they met; Louisa doesn’t tell her father when she meets Tobias or her mother when she meets Soonja. Louisa doesn’t know who Tobias or Soonja are to her family. She just knows to keep quiet.
After the prologue, Flashlight largely proceeds chronologically, moving towards the family’s trip to Japan (Serk is teaching a semester abroad) and then tracing the aftermath of Serk’s disappearance. Louisa, who was “contentious by reflex” as a child, turns even pricklier as a teenager and not much more pleasant as an adult. Anne is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and lives in the wake of her losses. Hundreds of pages after his disappearance, Serk’s fate is revealed. Spoilers ahead: Serk didn’t drown; he was abducted by North Koreans. Not because he speaks Korean, Japanese, and English and could be a valuable intelligence asset; simply because he happened to be there, on that beach, on that night. (Such abductions really did occur.)
Choi’s most recent novels were formally pressurized. The National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise had three tight sections, each with a destabilizingly distinct perspective. A Person of Interest and My Education both employed claustrophobic first-person narration to tell stories of intense dramatic tension (the fallout from a Unabomber-like act of terrorism and the fallout from a messy erotic affair, respectively). Flashlight uses a much more flexible third person, moving into one character’s perspective before pulling back out and zooming in on another’s. The chapters alternate between Serk, Anne, and Louisa, with a few odd exceptions: two follow Anne’s son Tobias, another a character who searches for missing South Koreans. The structure, and the sentences, feel freer, looser, less disciplined. Parts read like a thriller, others like domestic realism. Not everything fits; there are stretches that meander; not just Serk’s fate but the novel’s form appears shaped by contingency. The flashlight flits from one corner of the room to the next, seemingly without method. But that is the method: to give us glimpses but not the whole picture; to approach the story from different, not entirely reconcilable angles.
Choi rewards reading because she plays with perspective in a way that isn’t just technically impressive (though it is that, to be sure) but gets the reader thinking about larger issues. She’s interested in the alienation that comes from cultural and linguistic difference—from being, like Serk, “ethnic Korean instead of native Japanese, alien-Japanese instead of native Korean,” a “double exile” from his native Korea and then the Japan of his birth. And she’s interested in the alienation that comes from subjectivity itself. Because we change from setting to setting, because our characters shift over time, we are alienated from our own selves. “Continuity between the new Anne and the old one was no more possible than communication between her isolated nerves,” Choi writes. We are also, and especially in Flashlight, alienated from each other. Louisa knows that “the sum of the things she knows about her father could fit inside the sum of the things she’ll never know about him an infinite number of times.” She can light up a corner of his character here, illuminate a corner of his history there. But much remains in darkness. The best she, and we, can do is know we don’t know.
Anthony Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the book critic for Commonweal. He is the author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period. He has written for Book Post on Sigrid Nunez, Joseph O’Neill, Marilynne Robinson, Louise Glück, Rachel Cusk, Yiyun Li, and Gary Snyder, among others.
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