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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Susan Choi, who won the National Book Award for her 2019 novel Trust Exercise<\/a><\/em>, once again plays with narrative structure and unreliable narration in Flashlight<\/a><\/em>*, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Da da da dee, da da da, da da da da.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019s birth, her early years, and then to life after Serk\u2019s 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\u2019t wait to escape to college and shuts her mother out for most of her life, while Anne\u2019s 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\u2019s not wandering the world or hanging out in Buddhist temples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plot twist is really secondary to the four character studies that constitute Flashlight<\/em>, so if you do figure it out, it likely won\u2019t 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 \u2013 well, except that there\u2019s more suffering, there is a lot of suffering in this book \u2013 at a point where a reader might expect the plot\u2019s 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\u2019d 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 \u2013 and, even when they didn\u2019t deserve it, I was still rooting for any of them to get something like a satisfying ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n