Flashlight
Formidable ... In ambition and scope, Flashlight moves far beyond Choi’s celebrated academic novels or even her more political books ... With Flashlight, Choi’s appetite turns omnivorous. The claustrophobic atmosphere that made Trust Exercise so intense has exploded. She sweeps across decades and continents ... Catholic in its genre, shifting deftly from domestic drama to international thriller, from academic satire to bildungsroman ... The success of Flashlight stems from its ability to capture the minds of these characters with both sympathy and a touch of irony that provides just the distance we need to breathe ... Choi’s storytelling method is calculating but uncompromising ... A hundred pages in, I felt like I was developing Stockholm syndrome with this novel: I couldn’t wait to escape its fierce control and then couldn’t wait to crawl back to it ... Too often, I was disappointed to finish a page and realize it could have been trimmed to a single crisp sentence ... Choi’s determination to chronicle every pulse of her characters’ lives is both the novel’s strength and its burden. Even a work this fascinating shouldn’t presume upon a reader’s infinite patience.
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Choi writes memorable characters ... Where Choi’s writing is not as strong, though, is in the plotting ... A hugely ambitious book and it gets us to an interesting place, with insight into shocking, real-life events that deserve the attention Choi brings to them. It’s just that you’ll have to be patient to get there.
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Choi’s latest novel feels leisurely as she brilliantly shines the titular flashlight on each of her characters, catching their habits and quirks, exposing their intimacies ... pushes the boundaries of family, ethnicity, society, country, and history by challenging, parsing, and piecing together the complicated multitudes of tangled identities.
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