Flashlight. A torch in the night

Great family sagas often seek to explain everything. Family trees become maps, traumas claim to be transformed into formulas, and the past ends up behaving like an accountant presenting the bill to the present. Susan Choi’s new novel, a finalist for the 2025 Booker Prize, comes close to this pitfall on several occasions, but almost always manages to avoid it, because rather than constructing a family tree, it shines a light on a single detail, then lets it slip back into the shadows; and just when the reader thinks they have finally grasped where the heart of the story lies, the spotlight shifts elsewhere. The story begins with a disappearance, rather like in Ian McEwan’s “Children of Time” (Einaudi). Whereas in that novel a little girl vanished from a supermarket, here she is found alive on the beach, and it is her father who goes missing. It is an opening almost like that of a thriller, but the author has no interest in the mechanics of the crime novel. The question ‘What happened?’ serves only to give rise to another: how much can we really know about the people we love? The difference is crucial. From that moment on, the novel expands in every direction. Korea, Japan and the United States, amidst migration, broken families and children growing up amidst inherited silences; yet, for Choi, geography has its own significance. Places shape people’s characters, and even names seem to lose and regain their identity depending on the country in which they are spoken. Whilst many novelists today shy away from pauses, Choi does exactly the opposite. She allows herself lengthy digressions, delves into secondary memories, and lingers over conversations that seem marginal but only reveal their true significance a hundred pages later. You are holding a novel that demands time, it is true, but it will repay you in full. Naturally, this choice comes at a price, given that certain recurring themes – memory, the unsaid and elusive identity – linger longer than necessary. One gets the impression that the author trusts the reader’s intelligence less than the novel deserves. Cutting fifty pages would not have detracted from the work, but these are minor reservations in the face of an ambition rarely encountered in contemporary fiction. "Flashlight" belongs to that category of books that are in no hurry to become memorable, and whilst some scenes may even seem insignificant whilst you’re reading them, days later they come to mind with unexpected clarity. Susan Choi’s characters make mistakes, misjudge others and are constantly revising their own version of events. In the end, the title remains. A torch does not dispel the darkness, but merely cuts through a small part of it, leaving everything else in shadow. Just like this novel, which promises no definitive revelations, but only brief flashes of insight.

Susan Choi

Mondadori, 540 pp., 24 euros