A ten-year-old girl, Louisa, is walking on some rocks on a beach with her father at night, using a flashlight to light their way. The next thing she knows, she wakes up feeling half-drowned on the beach, and her father has vanished. It will be decades before she and her mother Anne get the whole truth.
Susan Choi, who won the National Book Award for her 2019 novel Trust Exercise, once again plays with narrative structure and unreliable narration in Flashlight*, a longer and more ambitious novel that leans heavily on a stranger-than-fiction slice of history to illuminate (pun intended) the four very eccentric characters within the story. It’s unfortunate, however, that they are all so unlikeable, making so much of this 500-page book a chore to read despite the smart prose and sensible pacing.
* Da da da dee, da da da, da da da da.
Saying too much about the plot risks spoiling the big twist, although I have to say I saw it coming almost from the start. (I’ve said before that I am not a reader who typically sees twists coming or successfully figures out the culprits in books; in this case, I was helped by a couple of clues and the fact that I know the real-world story that Choi used as her basis.) What I can say is that the story then moves back to how Anne and Louisa’s father, variously known as Serk or Seok, each grew up, including Anne giving birth to a son, Tobias, who goes to live with his father. The plot passes quickly to Louisa’s birth, her early years, and then to life after Serk’s presumed death by drowning, which happens as Anne is experiencing neurological symptoms that I think any reader will recognize as early signs of multiple sclerosis. Louisa becomes a very difficult and cruel teenager who can’t wait to escape to college and shuts her mother out for most of her life, while Anne’s life is largely filled with tragedy and disappointment. Tobias, meanwhile, pops back up a few times, eventually settling in as an itinerant samaritan who takes a particular interest in being a kind big brother to Louisa, when he’s not wandering the world or hanging out in Buddhist temples.
The plot twist is really secondary to the four character studies that constitute Flashlight, so if you do figure it out, it likely won’t materially alter your experience reading it. I did find some of the resolution to be exhausting to read, not because of the details, which are true to life, but because it was such a tonal departure from everything that came before – well, except that there’s more suffering, there is a lot of suffering in this book – at a point where a reader might expect the plot’s movement to accelerate towards the ending. Choi does craft indelible characters, even if at least two of them in this book kind of suck, and none of the four generated the empathy I’d expect to feel for at least one protagonist in any serious novel. Tobias is a wisp of a person, but the other three are well-rounded and hard to forget – and, even when they didn’t deserve it, I was still rooting for any of them to get something like a satisfying ending.
I couldn’t get there with Flashlight, even though it is well-written and well-crafted. I couldn’t avoid comparing it to one of the books she cites in her acknowledgements as an inspiration, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, which is a better plotted work, one that mixes its suffering with dark humor, and takes the reader to more interesting places. It may be an unfair comparison – there are only so many American novels that touch on North Korea, and only so many ways to get into the topic – but ultimately Flashlight came out on the losing end.
Next up: C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.