liberal
This month's best paperbacks: Susan Choi, Sarah Perry and more
Susan Choi’s Flashlight is domestically sprawling and geopolitically bold. Stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, Choi’s sixth novel reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires. Flashlight first appeared in the New Yorker as a short story – a standoff in a psychiatrist’s office. The novel opens here too. It is the late 1970s: 10-year-old Louisa has been dragged in for a consultation, and she’s not playing nice. She waits out the clock, evading, deflecting. “This room is full of tricks to get children to talk, but you’re too smart for them,” the doctor flatters her. “I’m too smart for compliments,” Louisa snaps back. Louisa’s father has drowned, and her mother has turned into a strange new invalid. What the girl feels defies grief or sympathy. This isn’t mourning, it’s mutiny; and it will take more than some avuncular desk jockey to tame her. While the doctor is distracted, she steals an emergency flashlight from his office – a low-stakes theft with high-voltage meaning. The night Louisa’s father disappeared into the water, he was holding a flashlight. Portentous torches will appear throughout these pages (it’s not the subtlest of metaphors for a novel about absence and secrecy). This is a story told in brief illuminations, like a child spinning a torch in a dark bedroom. Slices of light; slices of life. We begin with a flashback to Louisa’s parents. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean raised in Japan, is a child of postwar limbo. Caught between two nations, and claimed by neither, he trades his borderland life for a blank American slate – or so he thinks (America has other ideas). Louisa’s mother, Anne, is an obstinate, spiky creature, allergic to expectation. Pregnant at 19, she gives birth to a child she’s not permitted to keep, and her adult life shapes itself around her son’s absence, like a house built around a locked room. Louisa will inherit her mother’s bone-deep stubbornness – twin contrarians. When Serk drowns, he leaves behind a silence so complete it swallows the past whole. And so Louisa is left with two absent parents: one right in front of her; the other near mythic. Flashlight is a study of absence – absence of narrative, of inheritance, of place, of affection. Who are you, it asks, when there’s no story to inherit, no history to claim?
2 months ago
