Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Review by Walter Cummins
Flashlight’s nineteen sections, each focused on a situation in the life of a central character, are tour de forces, the situations inventive, the writing rich and intricate, the insights illuminating. Choi dramatizes the complex nuances of human interactions with a convincing originality. The unique worlds of her characters develop and deepen as they accumulate. But unlike most novels about a group of connected characters, Flashlight’s people deny fulfilling their connection even though they are literarily related by marriage and parentage.
Some characters deliberately reject what binds them with the others. Some want to, but fail to know how, to bond. Yet though they only occasionally interact through a presence in the same place, they are almost always in each other’s thoughts, even when they wish the other did not exist. These alienated loners are locked within themselves, sometimes having relationships with people, but rarely with each other, and often knowing little about the events of their relations’ lives.
At the heart of their aloneness is their failure to know a place where they feel they belong and, therefore, a rooted identity. Sert’s situation is emblematic. His original name that titles the first section of the book is Seok, and he is a boy of Korean descent born in a region of Japan where he speaks Japanese. When the war ends and Americans occupy Japan, he first encounters his native language and is lost, not knowing the sounds and characters: “Auntie Kim snarled in disgust. ‘The smartest boy in his school, and he can’t even read his own language.’”
Anne at nineteen is an unwed mother to a boy, Tobias, given up for adoption. Wandering in a state she has never known, Massachusetts, she ends up in Northampton and passes as a Smith College student even though she has not finished high school. Sert, uprooted from Japan, while one sibling stays and the rest of his family relocates to North Korea, lives nearby, completing a doctorate in in electrical engineering at UMass in Amherst. That coincidence of place allows him to encounter Anne, whom he eventually marries. He then finds a teaching position at an undistinguished Michigan university that has a relationship with a Japanese university, where he is sent, against his will, for an exchange year with Anne, and their daughter, Louisa. Once again they have been uprooted.
The book opens before Part I with a scene from that exchange time on a Japanese breakwater, where Sert, who cannot swim, has finally given in to Louisa’s desire to walk there: “In one hand he holds a flashlight which is not necessary, in the other hand he holds Louisa’s hand which is also not necessary. She tolerates this out of kindness.” That flashlight and the difficulty of illuminating more than a small circle introduces the title concept. Both father and daughter slip and fall into the water: Louisa is found unconscious and saved; Sert’s body disappears, assumed drowned.
Back in the United States, where a child psychologist, Dr. Brickner, has a flashlight in his office, Louisa asks what it is for, and he tells her, “It’s to see in the dark!” Louisa associates the flashlight with death and steals it to have safely at home, aware that on the breakwater she had dropped that flashlight in the sand and lost sight of her drowning father.
A flashlight reappears in the novel with Louisa in a college dorm with a dormmate named Vanessa, who plays a game using the flashlight to raise a spirit with alternating light and darkness. Louisa explains the effect through her knowledge of electricity, upsetting others but then clarifying that she believes in spirits: “How could she make Vanessa understand that she, too, had felt something, if not exactly a lonely Victorian ghost? She had felt a depth of loss.”
Flashlight, for all of the powerful scenes and strong writing, is more an integrated collection of stories than a plotted novel. The only character whose life pattern is fully revealed is Sert. The sections about the others are more like separate events illuminated in part as if by a flashlight beam, with everything outside the edge of that beam hidden.
Each section is, in effect, a partial illumination that leaves much in the shadows. The sections offer intense close-ups of the characters at particular moments but, except for Sert, do not offer the details of many major transitions, including marriage, divorce, childbirth, and death. These take place offstage without explanations.
However, as much as characters throughout the book consciously make efforts to escape the others, they ultimately find themselves belonging to a totality, even if they apart physically, inseparable from their collective place in the whole.
