Flashlight (2025)
Why this one?
A last minute conclusion to my (slower than usual) reading of this year’s Booker Prize shortlist.
Susan Choi (1969– ; active 1998–) was born in South Bend, Indiana, to a Korean father and an American Jewish mother. Following her parents' divorce when she was nine, she moved with her mother to Houston, Texas. She studied Literature at Yale and later earned an MFA from Cornell. Early in her career, she worked as a fact-checker for The New Yorker in New York City. Her debut novel, The Foreign Student, published in 1998, drew on her father's experiences in the Korean War and won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction.
Choi’s subsequent works have achieved significant recognition. Her second novel, American Woman (2003), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and A Person of Interest (2008) was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She is perhaps best known for her 2019 novel, Trust Exercise, which won the National Book Award for Fiction. Choi has taught creative writing at institutions including NYU and, currently, Johns Hopkins Flashlight, her latest novel, began as a short story that won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award.
Thoughts, etc.
Flashlight begins with the disappearance of Serk, a Korean émigré and academic, during a walk on along the coast in a small Japanese town with his young daughter, Louisa. While Serk is presumed drowned, Louisa washes ashore hours later, traumatized and unable to recall what has happened. The books subsequently spans decades and continents, as Louisa and her American mother, Anne, struggle to cope with their grief and the mystery of his vanishing. This sits against the complex geopolitical backdrop of the late 20th century, particularly focusing on the lives of Korean immigrants in Japan and the unsettling history of North Korea.
We learn more about Serk’s childhood in Japan, out of place as a Korean after his family moved there by necessity during the second world war. Most of his family later make the move back to Korea, where they find themselves caught under the repressive regime of the DPRK. Serk and his sister are the only ones to stay behind, but gradually lose touch and Serk is unwilling to talk about his family to Anne and Louisa, with whom he eventually moves to the US as an academic. They move back to Japan for a teaching secondment, living in unappealing conditions, with Louisa struggling to adapt and Anne’s health deteriorating. They move to the coast in an attempt to improve things, but they are only there for a few weeks before Serk’s disappearance.
[Significant SPOILERS follow this point!]
Subsequent chapters cover a lot of ground: we are introduced to Tobias, Anne’s son from a previous marriage who after a difficult childhood has become a benevolent but somewhat naive Japanophile, living the life of a kind of iterant monk and occasionally touching base with Louisa and ‘Our Mother’ (as Louisa refers to Anne); we see Louisa’s life developing through college and motherhood (albeit often in rather unsatisfying flashes); Anne finds a kind of love with a less complex, more all-American man, even as her health continues to fade. Most shockingly, after a large section of the book in which he is only an absence in others’ lives, we meet Serk again, not dead but his circumstances changed beyond recognition.
This is a book which packs a lot in to its 450 pages. It begins in gripping fashion with the mystery of Serk’s disappearance, ends what seems like (and in many ways is) lifetimes later in truly heartbreaking fashion,. and in its peak chapters set behind the veil of secrecy in North Korea, it captivates with its shocking brutality and the sheer desperation in which we find our central protagonist, seemingly lost but actually living - an outcome which at first gives us some hope but transpires to be a genuine case of a ‘fate worse than death’. Its characters are suitably well-drawn and believably human, so much so that to see the suffering they endure makes this at times a very tough read.
Thematically it’s also very broad in its coverage, at times a coming-of-age novel for Louisa, a fairly sad domestic tragedy for Anne, and a mystery/thriller/horror story for Serk. Alongside its broader themes it also has a central focus on a very specific thread of geopolitical history, namely the abductions of Japanese citizens by the DPRK in the late 70s and early 80s. The book covers the full history of these events and addresses the subsequent only limited acknowledgement of them by both country’s governments. The issue remains an area of diplomatic uncertainty between the two countries, with unsolved cases of disappearances still ongoing. One of the book’s central concerns is clearly to bring to life the scale of the loss experienced by families of those who were lost, as well as the horrors experienced by the missing. The latter is covered (as mentioned) in horrific detail, but the former is really addressed through the novel in its entirety.
It’s made particularly interesting by the decision to focus on a case in which those left behind had no idea of the dark fate of their missing person, rather than say those who spent years knowing (or at least believing) that this was their fate and campaigning publicly for their return. We meet some of these characters later, and while their own tragedies are painfully rendered (particularly the couple who have lost a child) the book feels more impactful as a whole for its angle that focuses its attention on Louisa, who is really subject a tragedy twice over, first in the grief attending the presumed death of her father, and later in the understanding not just the grimness of Serk’s true fate, but the sheer crushing weight (only hinted at, never spelled out) of the decades of potential connection unnecessarily lost, and the unspeakable cruelty of their final reunion, meaningful but in many senses simply too late.
It’s a rich, powerful, illuminating and moving book, which at its peak is genuinely remarkable. In comparison to some of the other great books on this year’s shortlist, it lost out somewhat by nature of its structure, which at times felt uneven. The weight of time spent on Anne and Louisa’s lives back in America is necessary to give its conclusion the impact it merits, but for me these sections felt both slightly padded out in terms of how interesting their contents are, and somehow at the same time not quite long enough to truly build the depth of connection we should have with these characters. Louisa, who really ends up as the book’s heart., has brilliant sections at the start and end of the book but I feel like we lose her somewhat along the way, living a life that’s perhaps deliberately ‘ordinary’ but read at times as simply unmemorable. Elsewhere the book picks up threads that aren’t really full resolved (perhaps like life, but in this case occasionally annoying) - for example the character of Tobias begins interestingly enough but ends up being little more than a conveniently located node, there to serve the plot rather than being given a conclusion of his own.
Score
8.5
Its best moments are maybe the best things I read in a generally strong year for the Booker shortlist, but it loses a few points for what I thought was slightly uneven pacing (long sections devoted to less interesting things, and then a conclusion that felt slightly rushed towards). It wouldn’t be my ultimate pick for the win, but I wouldn’t be entirely unhappy with it either.
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My final ranking on the shortlist looks something like this. Really all of the top five were, for me, extremely worthy books for a Booker shortlist and I think I enjoyed this year’s more than the last couple overall. If you’d subbed out The Rest of Our Lives for Seascraper (which would have been my overall favourite) I think you’d have had a very near perfect list.
1. Audition (9.5)
2. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (9.5)
3. The Land in Winter (9)
4. Flesh (9)
5. Flashlight (8.5)
6. The Rest of Our Lives (6)
Next up
Who knows! With an excellent Booker shortlist now completed, I’m free to choose for the first time in a while. Exciting!
