At the start of Flashlight, Susan Choi’s Booker-shortlisted novel, a father and daughter walk along a beach in Japan. “One thing I’ll always owe your mother,” Serk tells ten-year-old Louisa, “is she taught you to swim.” He himself can’t. That night, he disappears and is presumed drowned, though his body is never found. The tone is set: eerie, withholding, charged with unspoken emotion.
The next chapter moves to a child psychologist’s office in California, where Louisa now lives with her American mother. She refuses to discuss the disappearance, preferring to talk about Close Encounters of the Third Kind and alien abductions. The psychologist thinks he understands her: when she was found on the beach, Louisa had insisted her father was kidnapped. Gently, he explains that death is a kind of kidnapping. The reader believes him. The novel seems poised to deliver a story of trauma and denial, of a grieving child shielded by magical thinking.
Here’s where Choi delivers her big twist and best idea. What if Louisa is actually right? What if Serk was kidnapped? The story opens from domestic tragedy into political mystery as Choi links his disappearance to the real-life abductions of Japanese citizens by North Korea during the 1970s and 1980s. What begins as a study of family grief opens on to something larger, part political thriller, part historical excavation; a meditation on how state power shapes private lives for generations.
Flashlight follows a non-linear structure, circling back through the lives of Louisa’s parents, Serk and Anne. Serk’s story takes the novel deep into the experience of Koreans living in Japan in the 40s. Born to Korean parents in a country that refuses to claim him, he grows up as a resident alien, excluded from universities and careers. Still, he chooses to stay in Japan rather than go with his family to Korea: “Yes, Japan denied its resident Koreans every kind of privilege that existed, but the privileges existed, that was the difference.” It is a precise rendering of nuance, though these subtle social dramas sometimes weigh down the novel’s emotional rhythm. The more Choi explains, the more her characters seem pinned beneath the weight of history.
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The same cool, omniscient tone narrates her characters’ inner workings. Describing Serk’s pursuit of academia, Choi writes: “Such images of stained glass and ivy had twined themselves irresistibly into his ambition with the tenacity of ivy fixing its myriad feet to a wall.” It’s a solid metaphor, but one that insists a little too much. It scans on the level of sense, but the emotional truth it describes was already clear. The same is true of the flashlight itself, a symbol of illumination and revelation returned to so often it begins to feel almost insulting.
Choi’s ambition and meticulous construction are evident throughout. The novel is intelligent, deeply researched, and psychologically exact, but it can feel airless. The characters, closely analysed, lack the wild irrationality and oddness that make people real. Brilliant and precise, the story impresses but rarely touches the heart.
