FLASHLIGHT

A troubled American family suffers an insuperable loss during a year abroad.

While Choi’s latest—a domestic drama with deep roots in 75 years of geopolitics—has little in common with her previous novel, the National Book Award–winning coming-of-age story Trust Exercise (2019), it does share one characteristic with that book: Only so much can be said about its explosively twisty plot without spoilers. What’s sort of amazing is that a novel with such a locomotive of a plot—and give it a chance, because it doesn’t rev up right away—could just as reasonably be described as character-driven, devoted to unfurling the personalities and destinies of its three point-of-view characters, Serk, Anne, and Louisa Kang. Serk is an ethnic Korean born in Japan; his family was among those thrust into chaos by the regime changes of the 1940s and he ends up moving on his own to the United States to purse an academic career. There he meets Anne, a white Midwesterner whose teenage fling with a married man resulted in the birth of a son she barely saw before he was taken away; 10 years later, her marriage to Serk produces a daughter, Louisa, who’s at the center of the storm that is this novel. Though she is never a happy or easy child, her life will go from merely bad to unbearable in the middle of fourth grade, when she’s forced to go to Japan for her father’s visiting professorship. While Serk and Louisa are walking by the sea one night, something happens. The girl is found half-dead on the beach with few clear memories, and her father has disappeared; it is concluded that he has drowned. Louisa and Anne have many more challenges over the decades ahead, including serious chronic illness for Anne and a nearly disastrous college trip to Europe for Louisa, but one thing they will never have is a real connection. This is not an easy novel, but it has important things to say, and Choi is a writer you can trust to make the journey worthwhile.

Never sentimental, never predictable, this aptly titled novel illuminates dark passages both fictional and real.