Prickly, gorgeous ... There are no moments of total illumination here, just a beam shining briefly on a target before scanning restlessly onward ... One thing that hasn’t changed is what an outlandishly talented writer Choi is, her prose possessing an iron confidence in its own beauty. She favors complex, lightly punctuated sentences whose payoff comes late ... Choi is a writer who can be trusted to have a plan, and she sews the narrative up with a conclusion that’s almost impossibly heartbreaking — about which the less said the better. Some things you can see coming from miles away. But life, we’re reminded, retains its ability to surprise.
Formidable ... 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 ... 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’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 ... 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.
Satisfyingly layered ... Excellent ... In part an episodic family saga structured by the passage of time rather than the pressures of a story arc ... That Ms. Choi manages these swerving, even outlandish, dramatic twists without flattening her characters is this novel’s outstanding achievement. Flashlight investigates secrecy and coverups on the private, psychological plane and on the level of international intrigue.
