Not Everything Is Illuminated

Susan Choi's Flashlight is a gorgeous reflection on memory's elusiveness.

- BOOKS / SAM WORLEY

TEN-YEAR-OLD LOUISA is walking on a beach on the Japanese coast at night with her father, a cantankerous college instructor named Serk. It's 1978. They've left their sandals near a staircase leading to the village where they've been staying. Decades in the future, Louisa recalls the feeling of damp sand beneath her bare feet.

Or does she? Louisa will wonder what from these recollections is real and what has been grafted from some other time, some other beach, onto what turned out to be a fateful evening. The next morning, Serk has vanished-drowned, it's supposed-and Louisa is found unconscious on the shore. She retains an image of the flashlight he carried falling "almost noiselessly in sand," though not as "a memory, as Louisa understood memory... This wasn't something but nothing, an absence where a presence was expected."

Serk’s disappearance, and the black hole of uncertainty surrounding it, are the subject of Susan Choi's prickly, gorgeous new novel, Flashlight. Choi has been on the memory beat for some time. In Trust Exercise, a 2019 National Book Award winner set at an elite performing-arts high school, she explored how such a hothouse of creativity—where adults treat teenage theater students as the grown-ups they're only pretending to be—could enable a culture of sexual predation, delving into not just abuse itself but also the fallibility of memory, how old traumas reverberate. Although Me Too influenced the reception of Trust Exercise, its signal achievement was less its timeliness than its ingenious construction: Each of the book’s three sections upset basic information imparted previously, making for a reading experience as destabilizing as it was enthralling.

Trust Exercise was built like a steel trap, with prose and plotting so finely honed it lacerated.