Review: 'Flashlight' by Susan Choi
Pub. Date: 03/06/2025
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
But now it is just Anne and Louisa, Louisa and Anne, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa’s father?
Shifting perspectives across time and character and turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Flashlight chases the shock waves of one family’s catastrophe, even as they are swept up in the invisible currents of history.
A monumental new novel from the National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heartgripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways in which we are shaped by what we cannot see.
At its heart, Flashlight is about family and all the things that can happen to it. In a broader way, it is about loss and how grief can warp your life. In a big way, however, Flashlight is about Korea's history, about what it meant and means to be Korean, to be a Korean in America, to be a Korean in Japan, to be either North or South Korean. This latter aspect of the novel was, in many ways, the most intriguing to me, as I know shamefully little about either Koreas and their history. As such, some parts of Flashlight felt like a history lesson, but one which is deeply tied to characterisation. In some ways, it reminded me of Han Kang's We Do Not Part, which also manages to intertwine historical and generational trauma with a character study that cuts deep. As a (half-)German, I have some experience with trying to confront and deal with the history of your country, in all its horror and complexity. The aftershocks of the Second World War and the Holocaust affected different parts of my family differently, and these sides cannot always be united into a single, coherent narrative. Both Han Kang and Susan Choi recognise the inherently fractured nature of family history and trauma and manage to display this through the fractured natures of their own narratives. Because of this, neither of their novels are always easy or straightforward reading, but they are interesting and relevant texts which will reveal something deeper to the reader if they work their way through.
I find it difficult to provide a straightforward blurb or "intro" to this novel, because it surprised me in many ways with how it was told and because that surprise is a big part of why the novel ended up working for me. This "surprise" is aided by the structure of the novel, which switches between different perspectives. We start with Louisa, who has lost her father in what seems like a freak accident and is now faced with a child psychologist. We then learn more about her mother, Anne, thereby also gaining an insight into the family history and her specific struggles. These perspectives also cover the family's move from the US to Japan and the beauty and difficuly a move such as that brings. The father, Serk's, perspective, is also given space, from his childhood in Japan to his own thoughts and challenges leading up to the accident. Other perspectives also come in as relevant. Through this hopping around, the reader gains a more complex understanding of the family, especially because many perspectives clash somewhat. How a daughter sees her mother is not how the mother sees herself, while the things a daughter does not know about her father echo constantly in the father's own mind. My view of the characters kept changing, which was a very interesting reading experience.
This is my first book by Susan Choi, although she has been on my radar since Trust Exercise, which I still haven't read. In Flashlight, as mentioned above, Choi strikes a fine balance between deep character studies and a broad historical narrative. I know a little about how the Second World War impacted Asia, the role Japan played in it all and how its occupation of especially China left deep scars. Korea's role in all of this was not as clear to me and therefore a lot of what Choi explores in this novel was new to me. It's not just this history she explores, but also the experience of immigration, of illness, of estrangement and love, and a certain sense of disconnection and displacement. I found myself gripped by the narrative from the beginning, in ways I didn't fully expect. One element I did somewhat struggle with, while appreciating it and understanding its purpose, is how the different narratives clash in certain ways. The relationship between Louisa and Anne is so complex and there are so many things which go unsaid between them that it made me want to scream at times. Neither one is fully to blame for this, but neither is blameless either. It makes for a rich reading experience, but also a frustrating one. Choi's writing is very rich, though, especially in her descriptions of settings, which utterly came alive for me. That felt especially crucial for Flashlight, as it moves around a variety of settings and each leaves its mark on the characters. I will definitely be looking for more books by Choi!
I give this novel...
4 Universes!
I needed some time to get into Flashlight but then found myself very intrigued by how its various perspectives and timejumps came together to tell the story of a family.
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