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Summary
Summary
With its propulsive drive, vividly realized characters, and profound observations about soul and society, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Susan Choi's latest novel is as thrilling as it is lyrical, and confirms her place as one of the most important novelists chronicling the American experience. Intricately plotted and psychologically acute, A Person of Interest exposes the fault lines of paranoia and dread that have fractured American life and asks how far one man must go to escape his regrets. Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician near retirement age would seem the last person to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee must endure the undermining power of suspicion and face the ghosts of his past.
Author Notes
The daughter of a Korean father and a Russian-Jewish mother, Susan Choi was born in Indiana and raised in Texas. She holds an undergraduate degree from Yale and an M.F.A. from Cornell. Her first novel, The Foreign Student , won the Asian American Literary Award. Her second novel, American Woman , was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A Person of Interest is her third book.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After fictionalizing elements of the Patty Hearst kidnapping for her second novel (the 2004 Pulitzer finalist American Woman), Choi combines elements of the Wen Ho Lee accusations and the Unabomber case to create a haunting meditation on the myriad forms of alienation. The suggestively named Lee, as he's called throughout, is a solitary Chinese emigre math professor at the end of an undistinguished Midwestern university career. He remains bitter after two very different failed marriages, despite his love for Esther, his globe-trotting grown daughter from the first marriage. As the book opens, Lee's flamboyant, futurist colleague in the next-door office, Hendley, is gravely wounded when Hendley opens a package that violently explodes. Two pages later, a jealous, resentful Lee "felt himself briefly thinking Oh, good." As a did-he or didn't-he investigation concerning Lee, the novel's person of interest, unfolds, Lee's carefully ordered existence unravels, and chunks of his painful past are forced into the light. While a cagily sympathetic FBI man named Jim Morrison and Lee's former colleague Fasano (who links the bombings to several other technologists) play well-turned supporting roles, Choi's reflections from Lee's gruffly brittle point of view are as intricate and penetrating as the shifting intrigue surrounding the bomb. The result is a magisterial meditation on appearance and misunderstanding as it plays out for Lee as spouse, colleague, exile and citizen. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Choi (The Foreign Student, 1998, etc.) draws on the Unabomber case for her awkward third novel, about a campus bombing and a beleaguered Asian-American professor. Lee is an aging tenured math professor at an undistinguished state university in the Midwest. The adjoining office belongs to Rick Hendley, a much younger man with a much bigger reputation, a hotshot computer scientist loved by his students and envied by the unloved Lee. When a mail bomb explodes in Hendley's face, Lee feels a "terrible gladness." He does not visit Hendley in the hospital; when the man dies, he does not attend the campus memorial service. Petty and self-absorbed, Lee is no nicer now than he was all those years ago in grad school, when he was befriended by an evangelizing Christian, Lewis Gaither, and promptly stole his wife Aileen. Out of the blue, a letter arrives from Gaither, suggesting they resume their friendship. Could there be a connection between this letter and the bombing? An FBI agent seems to think so, and his suspicions are intensified when Lee lies to him about his relationship with Gaither. Choi alternates between the investigation and Lee's marriage to Aileen, doomed once Lee refused to show any interest in her baby John, fathered by Gaither, who later absconded with him. This can of worms acts as a severe distraction from Lee's current troubles, which multiply once the FBI declares him a person of interest (though not a suspect) and the media and neighbors harass him. (Echoes here of the Richard Jewell/1996 Atlanta Olympics story.) The abrupt introduction of the now adult John is a further distraction. The story does gain some momentum with Lee's cross-country dash to rendezvous with Gaither, who has now issued a Manifesto, like the Unabomber. But the climax, in the snowy Idaho woods, defies belief on several counts, among them Lee's last-minute makeover as a potential martyr. Lee's soul is too small to carry the novel, despite the author's astute observations. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Tenured math professor Lee has been teaching at a midwestern university for ages, yet he is utterly isolated within a web of anger and regret. When the popular young department star is gravely injured by a mail bomb, Lee is physically unharmed but psychically devastated. Assailed by painful memories of his affair with his only friend's wife and his own failed marriages, Lee, whose Asian background is left deliberately vague, is completely undone when he becomes a person of interest to the FBI. How he handles the hostility of his colleagues and the invasion of his privacy by the government and the press is the engine that drives this intricately psychological novel's brainy suspense, while the slow unveiling of his past tells a staggering story of love betrayed. Choi follows the game plan of her lauded second novel, American Woman (2003), a takeoff on the Patty Hearst story, venturing here, albeit superficially, into Unabomber territory. Lee is unconvincing as a mathematician but mesmerizing in his ineptness and anguish. Subtle humor, emotional acuity, and breathtaking plot twists keep this tale of wounding secrets rolling as Choi's brilliant calculus of revelation and forgiveness delivers a triumphant conclusion.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
YEARS ago, I asked a class I was teaching to read the first chapters of Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet" and "A Flag for Sunrise," by Robert Stone. The Balzac begins with a leisurely tour of a provincial town, while, near the start of the Stone, a hippie backpacker's corpse shows up in the freezer of an army lieutenant in a restive Central American country. I suggested to my students that the comparison might reflect one difference between 19th and 20thcentury fiction. Perhaps these contrasting openings had something to do with the way our attention spans have been altered for better or worse by the bright gratifications of movies and the rhythm of television, which has schooled us to expect the "hook" before the first commercial. Reading "A Person of Interest," it occurred to me that if we're lucky, Susan Choi's new book may turn out to be a prototypical 21stcentury novel, combining the unhurried pleasures of certain classics with the jittery tensions of more recent fiction. The plot begins with the shock of the new or at least the sort of commotion we used to hear about, all too often, when the Unabomber was waging his grisly war against teachers of engineering and hapless electronicsstore owners. In the first chapter, a bomb explodes, killing a popular professor of computer science, a rising star in his field who has briefly agreed to shed his light on a thirdrate college. Immediately, we find ourselves in the mind of one of the murdered man's colleagues, a mathematics professor named Lee. And gradually the pace slows down to that of a novel from an earlier era as Lee (neither the reader nor the novel's characters ever know him as anything but Lee or Professor Lee) reflects on his life at a level of depth we might expect to find in one of George Eliot's vicarages. Choi allows us to become intimately familiar with Lee, even as she keeps him at the precise distance he himself might choose to maintain. We are told that he is Asianborn, but not much more about the country he comes from, except for a few essentials: memories of a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire, the ocean never far away. All we need to hear about his disastrous second marriage is what he's left with after it's over: astonishment at the avidity with which his wife took everything that could be taken in a divorce. His more appealing and deeply loved but no less unsuitable first wife was the spouse of a graduateschool colleague whom she abandoned for Lee. She has since died, fraying Lee's relationship with their grown daughter, a quixotic and somewhat goofy environmental activist from whom he receives the occasional postcard. Lee acknowledges the jealousy and resentment he'd felt for the likable, innocent victim of the mailbomb attack, an ill will he'd never quite registered until he heard the detonation. But even as Lee is monitoring his own unacceptable response, Choi's readers may find themselves considering the odd happiness with which they look forward to spending hundreds of pages in the company of this cranky old man. Lonely, alcoholic, slovenly, Lee leads so pallid and constricted an existence that it's not surprising he spends so much time revisiting the past especially the adulterous courtship that preceded his first marriage. He's not merely recalling a more passionate period in his life, he's following an instinct (soon to be confirmed by events) that the crime against his colleague has something to do with him, and with that era. As Lee is drawn into the sensational publicity surrounding the investigation of the murder, the F.B.I., agent assigned to his case begins to suspect that the professor's relation to the bombing might be more than accidental. Reading about Lee's metamorphosis from innocent bystander to "person of interest," we are reminded of the grieving families of kidnap and murder victims judged guilty by the public for their failure to display emotion in the most banal and obvious ways. It seems less predictable than inevitable that all the qualities we come to associate with Lee his stiffness, his embarrassment, his volatile mix of pride and timidity begin to strike those around him as evidence of wrongdoing. Thematically, "A Person of Interest" echoes Choi's previous novel, "American Woman," based loosely on the events surrounding the abduction of Patty Hearst. Both books testify to the appalling ease with which the past can catch up with and then overtake us. Both say something about what it means to live in a society that is simultaneously tolerant and suspicious, inclusive and all too ready to punish its citizens for the crime of being their authentic selves. Both succeed in making us feel deeply for characters who are profoundly flawed. More important, both novels are beautifully written. Choi's precise, cadenced prose alternates between plainspokenness and lyrical dazzle. Her long, complex sentences compel us to follow wherever they go, and to admire the quiet authority, at once soothing and gripping, with which they arrive there. Choi can get impressive mileage out of the most minor detail: "On most days his briefcase hung from his hand virtually empty, but its purpose had never been as a means of conveyance. It was his keystone of self as projected by wardrobe, his version of the businessman's tie though, unlike the tie, which denotes a whole species, that briefcase meant Lee and was as good as his double. So that when his colleagues at school saw the briefcase perched somewhere alone, looking back they would think they'd seen him." She can also compress masses of information into a single line of dialogue when the wife of a devout churchgoer invites Lee to visit her at 9:30 on Sunday morning, or when an F.B.I., agent, interviewing Lee, speculates about why Asians are considered "immune" to the polygraph test. IN the book's final section, a surprising turn in the action shows how narrowly focused Lee's vision of the past has been. And when it begins to seem that the criminal investigation might progress beyond the tormenting of an innocent professor, the plot follows the promptings an anonymous letter, a series of false leads that have been tugging it in the direction of a psychological thriller. The idea that the mystery might have a solution gives the narrative a satisfying shape; it's also gratifying to see Lee offered the most tentative handshake of redemptive human connection. And yet the story's resolution also makes us realize that the plot was never what kept us reading this novel so intently. The question of who did it is ultimately less compelling than the character who clearly didn't. We read "A Person of Interest" for one of the best reasons to read any fiction: to transcend the limitations of our own lives, to find out what it's like to be someone else, to recognize unmistakable aspects of ourselves staring back at us from the portrait of a stranger. Francine Prose's most recent book is "Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them." Susan Choi's new novel lays bare an America that is simultaneously tolerant and suspicious.
Excerpts
Excerpts
It was only after Hendley was bombed that Lee was forced to admit to himself just how much he'd disliked him: a raw, never-mined vein of thought in an instant laid bare by the force of explosion. Of course, it was typical in his profession for diminishing elders to harbor ill-will toward their junior colleagues. But Lee, who had been tenured in his department for almost twenty-five years, felt that he was exempt from the obsolescence that infected most other professors his age. He was still capable of the harsh princeliness he'd possessed in his youth, although now he was half through his sixties, and his hair was all white. That old aristocratic hauteur would return suddenly, and his loose, dowdy trousers, always belted too high, would seem to sit on a younger man's waist. The liver spots that had come to his face would be bleached by the glare pouring forth from his eyes. His wasn't the kind of temperament spouse or child or friend had ever wanted to cleave to, but for his students it had the power to impress; like most of their peers, they found the notion of mentorship fusty. Unlike Lee in his own student days, they shunned the emeritus aura. They mostly wanted teachers who acted like pals--this was why they'd loved Hendley--but they didn't scorn Lee quite as much, he felt sure, as the other professors his age, the old men with their elbow-patched tweeds, and their stay-at-home wives who made cookies and tea for the very few students who still bothered to seek professorial counsel. His dislike of Hendley was all the more painful to him for his ignorance of it. Had he known he might have forgiven himself his eager awkwardness in the face of Hendley's camaraderie, the oh yeses he would hear himself helplessly blurting whenever Hendley found him at their faculty coffee events, as if the past fifty years hadn't happened and he was fresh off the boat with ten phrases of English etched painstakingly in his mind. His dislike of Hendley might have prepared him somewhat, if not for what happened then at least for the dislike itself, the cold shock of his first, addled thought when he'd felt the vast fist of the detonation, like a bubble of force that had popped in his face. He'd felt his heart lurch, begin to flop in disorder and fear; he'd seen with his own eyes his wall of university-issue bookcases, the cheap metal kind with adjustable shelves, seem to ride the wall separating his office from Hendley's as if they were liquid, a wave. He had waited an endless instant, the eon between beats of his heart, for those bookcases so laden with waxy math texts to crash down in one motion and kill him, but they somehow had not. The explosion--he'd known right away it was a bomb; unlike almost all of his colleagues, he knew the feel of bombs intimately--had somehow not breached the thin wall through which, day after day, he'd heard Hendley's robust voice and his bleeping computer, and the strange gooselike yodel of Hendley's dial-up modem when it reached its objective. The explosion had not breached the wall, so that the work it had wrought on the far side was left for Lee to imagine, as he felt the force wash over him, felt his heart quail, and felt himself briefly thinking, Oh, good. The bomb had arrived in a small, heavy cardboard box with the Sun Microsystems logo and address printed on it but afterwards it had been apparent to investigators, as it might have been to Hendley, had he examined the box with suspicion, that it had been reused--recycled, repurposed. Hendley had been alone in his office when he opened the box; Lee had known that Hendley was alone, would later realize that he had always been accurately and painfully aware of whether Hendley had student admirers in his office or not. The force of the explosion threw Lee from his chair, so that he found himself curled not quite under, but against the cold metal flank of his desk. For all that he'd lived through a violent and crude civil war, he'd never been that close to the heart, the hot core, of a bomb. He'd been in the vicinity of far more powerful explosives, such as left steaming holes in the ground--and of course, if he'd been as close, barely ten feet away, to any one of those bombs as he'd been to Hendley's, he would not have lived to feel Hendley's at all. But he had never been so close to a detonation, to that swift bloom of force, regardless of size, in his life. After the explosion Lee lay curled on the floor of his office, his body pressed to his desk, his eyes closed; they weren't screwed shut in terror, just closed, as if he was taking a nap. The building's automatic sprinkler system had been activated by the blast, and now regular, faintly chemical rain sifted down upon Lee with an unending hiss. Lee did not register the disorder of noise taking form in the hallway: the running feet, toward and away; the first shattering scream. The ambulances arrived first, and then the police and the bomb squad; it was the bomb squad that found Lee, sitting up by that time, with his back to his desk, his legs straight out on the cold tile floor, his gaze riveted forward, but empty. Later, he would tell the police he had known, without doubt, that the bomb must have come in the mail. That rhythm, so deeply ingrained in Lee's being: the last mail of the day, the last light stretching shadows across the cold floor, the silence that grew more deep around him as the revelry in Hendley's office began. Loneliness, which Lee possessed in greater measure and finer grade than his colleagues--of that he was sure --made men more discerning; it made their nerves like antennae that longingly groped in the air. Lee had known the bomb had come in the mail because he had known that only an attack of mail-related scrupulosity would have kept Hendley in his office with the door shut on a spring day as warm and honey-scented as this day had been; Hendley was a lonely man too, in his way. Because the neighboring office was quiet, Lee knew Hendley must be alone; because Hendley was alone, he knew that Hendley was opening mail; because Hendley was opening mail, Lee knew it was that day's mail, freshly arrived. Then the bomb, and Lee's terrible gladness: that something was damaging Hendley, because Hendley made Lee feel even more obsolete and unloved. It had been the gross shock of realizing that he felt glad that had brought him to sitting, from being curled on the floor, and that had nailed his gaze emptily to the opposite wall. He was deep in disgusted reflection on his own pettiness when the bomb squad found him, but unsurprisingly they had assumed he was simply in shock. Excerpted from A Person of Interest by Susan Choi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
