I read the new Susan Choi novel in five long sittings, each of which produced a storm cloud of indecision. Had Choi penned, as often seemed possible, the worst serious book in recent memory, an overwrought parody of self-conscious “MFA fiction”? Or was Flashlight a flawed but sometimes brilliant international saga, occasionally losing its thread, yes, but asking and answering momentous questions? 

That I still haven’t decided a week later says much about the state in which Flashlight is likely to leave readers. The follow-up to 2019’s slippery Trust Exercise, Choi’s new release is expansive, cinematic, and badly in need of editing. Whereas its National Book Award-winning predecessor demanded a puzzle-solver’s attention, Flashlight requires nothing so much as the page-turner’s dogged resolve. More than once, as its plot unspooled, I declared its main character, Louisa Kang, to be the least likable literary protagonist since Patrick Bateman, the cannibal-necrophiliac who narrates American Psycho. Yet Louisa’s resolution left me deeply moved. Perhaps the answer is that Choi is too talented, too inventive a storyteller, to write a truly unredeemable novel. But if Flashlight is the best she can now come up with, her career will increasingly be spoken of in the past tense. 

Like much literary fiction today, Flashlight melds the personal and the geopolitical, aware that the nuances of “identity” are best explored with a map in hand. Unlike most of its contemporaries, the novel is so resistant to summary that one hardly knows which chunk to break off first. Broadly speaking, the book is about the Kang family, a father, mother, and daughter whose........

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