The Graham Greene Gambit

On Susan Choi’s ‘Flashlight’

Jackson Pollock, The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, 1942, Oil on canvas

The writer Joy Williams once spit wit at a young author regarding what makes a great novelist. “They can do everything,” she said. “That’s sort of the point. You gotta do everything well.” Bad news for all the sentence hobbyists. You can’t just provoke attention. You have to sustain it. Not just with good syntax, but good scenes, good dialogue, good pacing, good action, good structure, and ideally some amount of gold that’s spun from whatever mess of hay we find ourselves rummaging through as humans, as Americans, as writers in a supposedly and increasingly post-literate age. Do it all as well as possible, and don’t forget to tell the truth.

Flashlight, Susan Choi’s latest novel, meets Williams’ standards. The simple glory of this fact shouldn’t be overlooked. I read Flashlight while my family watched television, while my youngest son gasped at spring lightning, while his siblings chased each other at the park. Amid all the distractions of modern life — I sometimes even went to work — Choi’s novel rose to the surface.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Choi has matched the hype. Her 2019 effort, Trust Exercise, is a mesmerizing balance of the playful and the acidic. In it, Choi navigates the great challenge from Dickens, from Orwell, or your most strident MFA student to snatch at the throat of current cultural upheaval as a feature, not a bug, of one’s art. From this angle, Trust Exercise is the ultimate #MeToo novel. Choi strip-mines the zeitgeist. High school students sleep with teachers and are abused by teachers. Various and counter-accusing narratives of consent create the flow of the story, each narrator becoming a kind of reverse matryoshka doll, subsequent points of view contextualizing and containing the voices they follow. It is, in short, that rare literary achievement: a successful, modern social novel.

With Flashlight, Choi joins a shadow canon that might be called the
“Graham Greene correlative.” Greene is, of course, the 20th-century pen behind Our Man in Havana, The Quiet American, the screenplay for The Third Man, and much more. Everything a 14-year-old wants from a story, Greene provides. Spies, murder, sex, mystery. When he’s at his best, he combines this panache for entertainment with literary virtues both subtle and grand: thrillers that philosophize, that romance, that unravel as a series of anxious and disintegrating points of view.

There’s a completeness to Greene’s work, in other words, that’s hard to resist. Especially in an era where we keep pretending to rediscover plot, his backlist offers an ostensibly easy-to-ape model of what to do with all these pretty sentences and difficult relationships that literary authors continue to conjure. Have you tried placing your distraught couple in postcolonial Africa? Perhaps you could send the philandering husband to French Indochina. At the very least, find a recently war-torn country and drop the domestic difficulties amid various nations’ efforts to patrol, control, liberate, redeem, withdraw. Let the relationships of the home tangle with the relationships of governments, peoples, and all the seedy seams that tie such bonds together. A man isn’t just having an affair. He’s failing British Sierra Leone.

It’s no surprise that so many writers have been tempted by Greene’s inimitable ways. Denis Johnson self-consciously reproduces Greene-tinted novels in The Stars at Noon and The Laughing Monsters. There’s also, as a sampling, Phil Klay’s Missionaries, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate, William Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise, Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, and even Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring. Maybe I’m downplaying the influence of John le Carré. Percival Everett belongs on this list, arguably, and any year now I expect Zadie Smith to give us her own Greene-flavored feast.

Choi, to her credit, has been dabbling in thriller waters for years. Before Flashlight or Trust Exercise, there was A Person of Interest (2008), about a falsely accused professor who gets tangled in a Unabomber-esque plot of FBI intrigue. Even Choi’s less obvious genre-curious books, such as My Education (2013), have a propulsive edge, are rife with the difficulties of sex and deceit, and are about the way some people slip through the cracks of an institution, a city, or even a social class.

With Flashlight, we find Choi fully outfitted in Greene thematics. At age 10, Louisa Kang wakes on a beach in Japan, having almost drowned. Her father, with whom she was strolling, has vanished — presumed drowned. Nobody knows for sure because Louisa can’t remember falling into the water and her father’s body isn’t recovered. We move from her juvenile fog into her father’s own childhood. He’s ethnically Korean but grows up in Japan, a child when the Americans invade during World War II. He has internalized his adopted Japanese identity to such a degree that his parents must ask him, as a favor, to go by his given name, Seok, within the house. When his parents and most of his siblings decamp for North Korea, he stays in Japan, attends university, and eventually lands in America.

Seok, called Serk the rest of the novel as an American slippage, is a Greene thriller unto himself. His family — and every Korean family he knows — is caught in various imperial and counter-imperial matrices: the Americans, the Japanese, something called the Organization. The last of these is a communist connection that all the ethnic Koreans use in Japan, even if it’s not clear how much it is or isn’t a tendril of North Korea. And of course there’s North Korea itself, including its borders with China and the American-backed South Korea. Forced into an acquaintance with another Korean, Tae-Min, at his American university, Serk accuses the younger man of being a spy or at least a political pest. Ridiculous, of course. Serk and Tae-Min, who is actually from Seoul, both receive ominous mailings from what must be a North Korean contingent. Propaganda. Silliness at worst. Except Tae-Min disappears, leaving his wife frantic with concern. Serk is dismissive. “Goddamn crazy woman,” he surmises. Then she disappears, too.

The real power of a Greene narrative, though, is that the thrills sit sidecar to matters of the heart. There’s no Greene plot without a fraught romantic relationship, ideally one involving a broken but binding marriage. Enter Anne, who completes the novel’s trifecta of protagonists along with Serk and Louisa. White, intelligent, she’s both dominated by Serk and his equal in terms of temper and grit. Serk calls another Korean a “class-A motherfucker” in English at one point, which surprises the man. “My American wife,” he explains, “called me that when she got really angry.” Louisa, their daughter and the hinge point between the spouses, is the real love of Serk’s life, and whatever tinge of Cold War danger surrounds the disappearance of Tae-Min is buried beneath Serk’s domestic preoccupations. He needs to return to Japan, where his family in North Korea might be returning as well. He needs his one sister still in Japan not to reveal her identity to his wife and daughter. The balance of his American family — not peace but a kind of equilibrium — is as high stakes as any political skullduggery.

In fact, the various storylines — of Louisa growing up, of Anne growing up, of Anne growing sick, of Louisa growing distant, of both of them struggling in the wake of Serk’s disappearance to secure stable relationships — all deliver their own unexpected punches. Choi’s gift for capturing the intensity of her characters’ emotional lives in jumps, monologues, reversals, and confrontations, without falling into melodrama, has never been more controlled or conspicuous. Serk, Anne, and Louisa form a tripod torn apart both by one moment — Serk’s disappearance — as well as by a lifetime of choices, mistakes, and happenstance. Anne’s sickness hits her in lockstep not only with their family’s departure for Japan, but also with her becoming a widow. Choi avoids any cheap symbolism by showing how the characters struggle with this coincidence — exactly the kind of coincidence that makes life so maddening, that gives a sheen of meaning to what is simply a tragedy of genes and timing. “Her mother didn’t need that chair,” Louisa thinks as a child. “She was faking it.”

Louisa especially, who escapes the worst trials of both her parents, zigs and zags into adulthood with such ferocity, confusion, and determination that even the slower sections of careful introspection and description never become baggy. There’s no Organization or violent teachers or threat of forced repatriation or even the bodily imprisonment of chronic pain, yet Louisa’s story of survival and of loneliness is no less dynamic than her parents’. Here, finally, is an author capable of describing a student’s first day at an Ivy League school without the reader wanting to reach through the pages and gag every character with duct tape.

Choi partly creates Flashlight’s trainlike energy by skipping past the happy stretches in all three of her leads’ lives. Nothing will stop the cars on their tracks, not even the cars turning over or colliding into other cars. There’s Anne’s teenage surprise baby, for example — a boy who reappears in her life with a tumor in his head for just long enough to electrify himself at a farm while with her and Louisa before also showing up, years later, in Japan. Next stop, please. The recoupling, the passionate first years of marriage, the sepia summers at home are almost always noted after the fact. Choi builds clear narrative arcs — Why is Anne sick? Why can’t Louisa remember the drowning? Why, if Serk drowned at the same spot as Louisa, was his body lost and hers recovered? But she does so through constant reprise of in medias res.

Not only do sections and chapters open with uncontextualized settings and new family arrangements — “Louisa has three boys now? I thought she only had two!” — but the transitions between paragraphs are often their own leaps from one era to the next. Louisa is 13 and working a pizza job. She and her mother aren’t getting along, although “Anne would rather be hated by her daughter than pitied, having experienced both.” Wonderful. We’re in the teenage years! Except the next sentence carries us off at warp speed. “After Louisa left home for college Anne found that by switching to a one-bedroom she could afford to move to a nicer place.” The train slows so the reader might enjoy certain points of interest, but Choi will not let you forget that the train is always moving. Louisa’s teenage years — in a bad neighborhood and a bad apartment, and full of trials that actually are salient, even vital, to her later decisions — are not worth their own breaks in the schedule.

The narrative often skips initial bad times too, passing over the incipient mucking of a marriage, of parenting, of disease. We hear about these maladies in retrospect, as a part of Louisa or Anne or even Serk — the least introspective — grappling with the messy middle into which the reader is dropped by default. The best relationship of Anne’s adult life begins with a well-choreographed meet-cute, but the man dies in a hospital between chapters. So, as an old woman, does Anne.

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that Flashlight is rushed or, given the aforementioned Graham Greene references, in any way derivative. That we haven’t devoted whole paragraphs to Tobias, Anne’s child from her adolescent and abusive fling, is a testament to the novel’s embarrassment of riches. A white American who resembles his birth mother, Tobias is a kind of wandering, inspiring, pathetic, endearing, religious mendicant. He finds a home in Japan, even learns the language with near-native fluency. That this is such an American and annoying way to react to Japan isn’t lost on the characters or on Choi, but Tobias is not a mere clown or jester. “I am one of those weird Western people who is enamored of the lives of Buddhist monks,” he tells some new Japanese friends, “but lacks the discipline to actually live like them.” His self-awareness charms them, and it’s meant to disarm the reader — not so that we pretend he’s something other than he is, but so that we appreciate the paradox of what it means to be an expatriate: someone both in pose and at ease, the very distortion of the pose its source of comfort. He lives in that tension, one we might mock, minimize, or even lambast, once upon a time, as appropriation.

Choi gives depth to even thumbnail sketches. One of my favorite moments sees middle-aged Louisa trading off child care duties with her nanny. “In the kitchen Nthabe was cutting up carrots for Leo. ‘Carrots for Leo!’ cried Leo.” Louisa responds with “commensurate exaltation,” a big “Yay!” that captures the American need for “every transaction with toddlers” to be “Outsize and Happy.” The scene is pitch-perfect, enough so that Choi doesn’t waste the reader’s time enumerating the exact origin of Nthabe’s name, Leo’s sensitivity to his nanny’s attentions, or even Leo’s language development. It’s there. We’ve got it. A full picture.

Defined by such compression, Flashlight, which traces the consequences of losing a parent into narrative alleyways both banal and international-crime adjacent, is what might happen if The Goldfinch were written by Ford Madox Ford. I enjoyed The Goldfinch when it was published and admire Donna Tartt. But where the earlier novel belabors a teenage flirtation with a cool, dangerous friend for hundreds of pages, Choi condenses almost all of that into 10 pages, sometimes five. It’s an invigorating achievement.

The switches between perspectives are key to Choi’s unrelenting pace. Serk and Anne and Louisa don’t have to give the whole story — the panoramic view. Anne is neglected by her adult daughter, whereas adult Louisa is rebuffed by Anne’s sense of pride and privacy. Serk is severe with both his wife and his daughter but almost entirely on behalf of his young daughter’s well-being. He must compensate for all possible damage that might ever occur, and the fatherly logic of this clicks into place alongside Anne’s chafing at his harshness — both of which co-exist with, and even explain, Louisa’s sense of paternal partisanship. What’s more, the timelines mix at the beginning, with young Anne and young Serk and even younger Louisa all vying in parallel.

As such, Flashlight captures a sense of what it means to be formed by family, to be received into the world without choice, and to keep receiving from it, for better or worse. The sediment of personal and national history that sits behind one’s parents — that pressures them and pressures you whether you see it or not — collapses on Anne, Serk, and Louisa to varying degrees. They must tend or ignore their own wounds, and live with the wounds they cause. There are no cheap concessions to unearned sentiment. But the story is clear that the demands of family — those fellow travelers we are always trying to shut out — must be acknowledged, fumbled, met, avoided. We’ve been thrown into the world together.

What might be called a “family saga” by a marketing intern is thus rendered a family mosaic — a coming-of-age story for the family as a unit, a history of its mutating dynamics, resentments, and compromises. Serk and Anne and Louisa are alone, often separated by years and countries as well as gaps of understanding, and yet they all evolve and survive and diminish in reference to each other. Forced to be a caregiver after her children have left home, Louisa can’t help but wonder, “Did she really never once push Anne’s wheelchair?” She’s not self-lacerating. She’s trying to get a handle on the facts. What happened to her and her mother, though it should be far more legible, is as much a mystery as what happened to her father on a beach in Japan when she was only 10.

Joel Cuthbertson is a writer and librarian from Denver. His short stories and essays have appeared in Joyland Magazine, Electric Lit, LARB, LitHub, and more. He can be found at his Substack Commonplace Bert.