Were We Right or Were We Right?: Susan Choi's A Person of Interest
Publishers Weekly -- Publishers Weekly, 2/21/2008 12:09:00 PM
Fusing elements of the Wen Ho Lee accusations and the Unabomber case, Susan Choi’s third novel, A Person of Interest, has drawn multiple raves from other novelists: all love the novel, and all focus on it as character study and cultural barometer rather than as suspense vehicle. A crescendo of glossy coverage confirms their takes, taking up the redemption angle over the whodunnit.
In opening of her New York Times Sunday Book Review piece, Francine Prose invokes Balzac and Robert Stone, and says that Choi’s novel “may turn out to be a prototypical 21st-century novel, combining the unhurried pleasures of certain classics with the jittery tensions of more recent fiction.”Novelist Marisa Silver, writing in the L.A. Times, calls Choi's book “a complicated and revealing journey into the alienated heart of modern American life” and finds main character Lee “an enigma we cannot turn away from.”
“[S]tunning…. elegant and surprisingly expansive” writes novelist Elizabeth Hand in the Village Voice, going on to note that the book “relies less on the confluence of history and personality than it does on the illumination of a single, timeless character.”
The San Francisco Chronicle's review, by Matt Shears, calls the novel “psychologically rich…. moving and compelling.”
The Onion’s A.V. Club gives the book an A-, and while writer Zach Handlen is skeptical of the novel’s suspense elements, he says it “presents a path to redemption all the more remarkable for its lack of obvious salvation.”
The book has also shown up in the glossies: Vogue, O: The Oprah Magazine, GQ, Entertainment Weekly (a short profile, not a graded review), and Vanity Fair. (While the pieces aren’t Web-archived directly, they can be found here.)
Here’s PW’s starred 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 émigré 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.
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