Formidable ... Readers first drawn to Choi through her National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise (2019)...will find here the same acute perception of emotional turmoil and a similarly serpentine reconsideration of disputed events ... In ambition and scope, Flashlight moves far beyond Choi’s celebrated academic novels or even her more political books ... With Flashlight, Choi’s appetite turns omnivorous. The claustrophobic atmosphere that made Trust Exercise so intense has exploded. She sweeps across decades and continents, gathering in her hands the cultural upheavals and political machinations of competing nations ... Catholic in its genre, shifting deftly from domestic drama to international thriller, from academic satire to bildungsroman ... The success of Flashlight stems from its ability to capture the minds of these characters with both sympathy and a touch of irony that provides just the distance we need to breathe ... [Choi] has...a narrator always ready to translate her adolescent fury into the most exquisitely precise language ... Choi’s storytelling method is calculating but uncompromising ... A hundred pages in, I felt like I was developing Stockholm syndrome with this novel: I couldn’t wait to escape its fierce control and then couldn’t wait to crawl back to it ... Although these various stories put tremendous pressure on Choi’s range, she never breaks a sweat. Intimate communities in the United States and Asia rise up in these pages with the same lived immediacy. It’s compelling—but also demanding in the ways of, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s relentless scrutiny ... I’m not a brevity fanatic. I understand that the elaborate ruminations of Flashlight are meant to convey the long, unresolvable agony of this family’s ordeal, but there are moments when the psychological coring performed on these characters produces nothing fresh. Too often, I was disappointed to finish a page and realize it could have been trimmed to a single crisp sentence ... Choi’s determination to chronicle every pulse of her characters’ lives is both the novel’s strength and its burden. Even a work this fascinating shouldn’t presume upon a reader’s infinite patience.
Choi’s (Trust Exercise, 2019) latest novel feels leisurely as she brilliantly shines the titular flashlight on each of her characters, catching their habits and quirks, exposing their intimacies ... pushes the boundaries of family, ethnicity, society, country, and history by challenging, parsing, and piecing together the complicated multitudes of tangled identities.
Choi's ability to make coincidences seem inevitable makes this a delicately balanced drama ... Choi feeds to readers seemingly disparate clues that coalesce in a tale of espionage and global conflict, and the heartrending ways in which world struggles play out in individual lives ... Choi has a gift for instilling empathy in readers as she shows her characters' flaws.
Never sentimental, never predictable, this aptly titled novel illuminates dark passages both fictional and real ... What’s sort of amazing is that a novel with such a locomotive of a plot—and give it a chance, because it doesn’t rev up right away—could just as reasonably be described as character-driven, devoted to unfurling the personalities and destinies of its three point-of-view characters ... This is not an easy novel, but it has important things to say, and Choi is a writer you can trust to make the journey worthwhile.
Ambitious if digressive ... Though long sections of character development often fail to gel with the main events, Choi’s well-shaded characters are also the book’s strongest element, particularly as she sharply delineates the difficult relationship between Louisa and Anne, who often treat each other more like housemates or acquaintances than mother and daughter. This gripping story of a family in crisis is tough to shake.
