Shelf Talk: Flashlight

Susan Choi fooled me again

I’m trying out something new! Each month I’ll write a Shelf Talker, spotlighting one hyped new release— the kind of book that earns prime placement on bookstore tables or makes a lot of noise on the apps and interviews. I’ll tell you if I think it’s worth the noise.
The monthly themed reading menus focused on backlist titles will continue as usual.

If you like this new feature, I invite you to ❤️, engage, and share.

This month’s pick is Flashlight by Susan Choi.

Flashlight’s excellent opening

Flashlight has been featured on several “most anticipated books of the year” lists and its launch was featured in all the major publications. While I did not love how Choi’s 2019 National Book Award winner Trust Exercise—an angry trickster of a book about a disconcerting topic—made me feel, I knew the whole time I was reading it that I was in the hands of a masterful writer who could keep me off balance and yet compel me to turn the page. I wanted to see what Choi would do with a more straightforward mystery, which is how Flashlight was marketed.

After reading the opening, I thought I was hooked. Flashlight takes as its prologue a lightly edited short story by the same title published in The New Yorker in 2020.¹ The story focuses a beam of light on one incident, a child’s visit to a school psychologist that’s obviously part of a much more complicated story, in a way that reveals so much depth about the family dynamics and the situation even as the details of the backstory remain obscured. Interestingly, the story Flashlight itself starts with a prologue.

A father and daughter walk along the beach on a dark night, at a point in time prior to the story’s timeline. They discuss swimming lessons, and her feigned hatred of them is revealed as a contentious response to her mother. The father is the preferred parent. He says what we learn may have been his last words to the child: a request that she show gratitude she doesn’t yet feel to the mother they’ve left behind at home, who is ill and unable to walk.

These rich details take on more meaning as the story unfolds. Through Louisa's childish point-of-view, we experience the visit to this psychologist in the aftermath of that night when her father disappeared. She lays out her claim to wisdom, which she then tests real-time with this psychologist: “No one was ever listening closely–even the people who especially claimed to be listening were not really listening.” We learn she’s smarter than the adults around her, proud to withhold from them whatever it is they may expect from her with contempt, even as she hopes someone will notice what she’s up to. But as usual, he doesn’t notice until she’s gone.

Can you think of any other examples of this, where an author opens a novel with a short story they previously published? It’s an intriguing dare Choi sets for herself, in the sense described by Courtney Sender recently in her piece about what makes a good opening to a work of fiction. The prologue lays out a test for the author, to make a compelling longer work out of the elements of a successful short story. And for the reader, it’s a challenge to pay attention to those major motivating elements throughout the longer narrative. 

The opening lays out the elements that will be remixed throughout the novel– Louisa’s alignment with her father Seok and rejection of her mother Anne, additional family members previously unknown, moving between countries, illness, intergenerational estrangement. The disappearance of course, and Anne and Louisa’s response to the trauma, and a flashlight that’s not just a flashlight. But readers who are paying attention will find that Flashlight is not quite the mystery it’s sold as. If you want a mystery, you will have to forget you have read the prologue as you go on (and don’t read the rest of this review)!

The specific way Louisa acts out when the psychologist brings up the question of what happened to her father answers that question with heartrending clarity, even as she disavows her initial statements about what she witnessed. The opening reveals what happened to the father. Unless the reader is one of those adults who don’t listen, of course. Because Louisa’s behavior unsettles, and the adults in the story do not. Instead, they close the door on her.

And from the first chapter, a richly researched account of Seok’s coming of age as a Korean migrant in Japan after World War II and his family’s return to North Korea that leaves him open to migrate to the U.S., I knew whodunnit. With the biggest questions about what happened to Seok answered by page 50 and nearly 400 pages to go to discover whether his last words in the prologue to the short story really would signal the end of this relationship, the tension around the mystery sags early.

A very serious middle. A disappointing end.

There are still plenty of open questions however about how and why and whether the truth will ever become know. But as focused as the point of view illuminating the opener is, the language and timeline lose their charge beyond the first pages. In Trust Excercise and the short story Flashlight, Choi’s muscular prose strides through time, landing efficient punches of insight that seem to belong specifically to the character. But the rest of this novel meanders.

In later chapters, the point-of-view shifts among Seok/Serk, Anne, Louisa and Tobias, a drifter who drops in and out of the family’s narrative, and the chapters don’t follow each other chronologically. By creating characters who don't like to reveal much about themselves to each other and who, when they have choice in the matter, avoid each other, Choi drags out the revelations that lead to the novel’s conclusion. The arcs of these four characters require patience, because in isolation any growth they experience in relation to the family dynamics or the central questions of the story unfolds slowly. Anne and Louisa in particular never talk about Seok, except through an obvious deflection in the case of a missing cat, until Louisa herself is a mother. There’s no one working to solve any mystery, unless its the reader.

For anyone interested in the banal evil of the world’s most secretive regime, or in better understanding the nuances of the Korean diaspora, Flashlight is not a waste of time. It is well-researched. Choi creates tolerable distance from the brutal realities by fictionalizing real accounts of systematic destitution, kidnapping and imprisonment. In that regard, it’s a worthy performance.² Looking back from the end on that opening moment with the psychologist, the missed opportunity to have known all along takes on greater poignancy. In that sense, the opening has a lot of integrity.

In the final pages, Louisa’s character shows that she has grown in a way I found moving, but the denouement depends on a disappointingly contrived coincidence that centers the book’s most clueless character, a laughably typical specimen of bumbling American traveler in the East, as the best listener of the bunch. The resolution is deliberate on her part, but accidental for the characters. While I appreciate that Choi takes her initial wanna-bet? dare laid out in the opening seriously by addressing Luisa’s initial claim to wisdom that “nobody’s listening,” ultimately I didn’t buy the way she disproves it.

July new releases

I haven’t decided which July book to review yet. You can help me choose. Which July new release would you be most interested in reading about in next month’s Shelf Talker feature? Let me know by responding to this subscriber poll.

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (July 8)

Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (July 8)

The Other Wife by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy (July 15)

Everyone is Lying to You by Jo Piazza (July 15)

So tell me…

• Have you read Flashlight, the short story or the novel, and what did you think?

• Novels with the best openings: we’re listening!

• When people ask me how I have time to read so much and write these posts, my usual answer is “I don’t really sleep.” But that’s changing! After nearly a decade of (not) sleeping like a toddler on a red-eye, I’ve made it through 6 weeks of the sleep restriction phase of CBT for insomnia and now if I wake up I almost always go right back to sleep. Wish I would have known this was possible sooner. Insomnia recovery: ask me anything!

• What books would you recommend to an insomniac?

Cheers,

1. On Substack notes, people like to debate whether there are any good short stories published in The New Yorker anymore. This is an example I still remembered, five years after it appeared.

2. I was reminded of the wisdom claim by Katie Kitamura’s unnamed narrator in Audition. When it comes to watching someone’s performance, “we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation.”