Book: FLASHLIGHT
Author: Susan Choi
Published by: Jonathan Cape
Price: Rs 899
Set between 1939 and the early 2000s, Flashlight — a Booker nominee — is a sprawling tale of a nuclear family fraught with secret pasts and blurred edges of memory, unaware of the deep impact of the geopolitical tension between Japan and North Korea on their lives.
Serk is a Korean born in Japan to immigrant parents who are delighted to return to Korea after the war. Priding himself as a Japanese, despite speaking Korean at home, he immigrates to the US when he comes face to face with the racism that affected his education and employment significantly in Japan. Twice exiled, he marries Anne who had parted ways with her traditional family, became a mother at 19, and given away her son, Tobias, to his father, before settling for the role of a typist for a professor in Indiana. When their daughter, Louisa, turns 10, they move to Japan for a short period of time. One evening, Serk and Louisa go for a walk on the beach, leaving an ailing Anne at home. They do not return. Louisa is found on the shore the next morning, barely breathing; Serk is nowhere to be found. Wrapped in this tragedy, Anne and Louisa return to the US, their relationship already soured by Anne’s immobility from an undiagnosed illness. Meanwhile, Tobias decides to get in touch with his mother and becomes an uninvited part of Louisa’s life.
The third-person narration anchored in the different characters of Louisa, Serk, Anne and Tobias moves at a glacial pace, barring the bits with dialogues. It begins with Susan Choi’s short story published in The New Yorker in 2020, depicting Louisa’s interaction with a school psychologist, Dr Brickner. It establishes her relationship with her parents before and after Serk’s death, vividly capturing the workings of a child’s mind to form perceptions of the world, people, and herself. The novel then moves to another immersive chapter depicting Serk’s childhood in Japan, unaware of the racial politics at play. Its slow realisation forms the basis of his bitter and aloof character. Choi deep dives into the banal moments of the lives of the characters while bypassing the big ones in a sentence or paragraph, perhaps in a bid to show how memory works.
The title is a metaphor through which the story is told. At any given moment, Choi allows the reader to look at the lives of her characters in a single beam. The reader is aware of the bigger picture, the darkness surrounding the singular source of light, and, hence, waits for the big revelation, for the pieces to connect. But the pieces don’t quite come together and the reader is left with an uneven telling of a story, trying to figure out where it’s headed. Choi entertains many digressions, making the characters too real to exist within the realms of fiction, and dilutes the impact of some moments that could have been either heartwarming or heartbreaking. Serk, Anne, and Louisa are haunted by absences in ways that make them bitter towards one another. They are somehow brought together by the unlikely yet the only likeable saint-like character of Tobias.
The geopolitical tension, especially a chapter dedicated to the disappearances in Japan in 1977, is briefly yet intricately described. Simultaneously, there’s a sense of disbelief when Louisa travels across Europe, forgets to buy metro tickets, is violently checked for drugs on the border, making one wonder if these events are added to empathise with her character which remains unlikeable for the most part. Yet another profound exploration is the impact of an undiagnosed chronic illness on a person, shifting her identity and self-perception in the process, leaving her to wonder about her sanity, in turn affecting her relationship with her husband and daughter.
Flashlight is ambitious in its scope and intriguing in its premise of exploring identity through race, illness, and death over a period of 70 years. However, it is made limited by its chronicling, which, despite the impeccable writing, tests the reader’s patience.