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Susan Choi Is Still Outlandishly Talented
A father’s disappearance, and the black hole of uncertainty surrounding it, are the subject of her prickly new novel.
In Trust Exercise,a 2019 National Book Award winner set at an elite performing-arts high school, she explored how such a hothouse of creativity — where adults treat teenage theater students as the grown-ups they’re only pretending to be — could enable a culture of sexual predation, delving into not just abuse itself but also the fallibility of memory, how old traumas reverberate. “It was as if she’d stepped into a movie and was doing so well in her role that no one else knew she was only pretending.” In Louisa’s eyes, a major factor inhibiting her life in Japan is her white American mother, who rarely leaves their apartment owing to a mysterious physical ailment — and, when she does, stands out as the most obviously different among their family trio. In some ways, Flashlight recalls Choi’s 2008 novel, A Person of Interest, in which suspicion for a series of Unabomber-like attacks falls on a man named Lee, an immigrant from an unspecified Asian country whose resemblances to Serk approach the amusingly specific: Both are dyspeptic academics living in the Midwest whose white wives shop for cold cuts at a certain deli, teach their daughters to swim against their husbands’ anxious objections, and ultimately develop a fatal or disabling illness.
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