A Person of Interest: A Novel [Audiobook, Unabridged] [MP3 CD]

Susan Choi (Author), Bernadette Dunne (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 2008

Lee is a math professor at a second-tier university in the Midwest. When a mail bomb goes off in the office of the star computer scientist next door, Lee is slow to realize that students and colleagues have begun to suspect that he's the Brain Bomber, an elusive terrorist whose primary targets appear to be academic hotshots. In the midst of campus tumult over the bombing, a letter arrives from a figure in Lee's past, which forces him to revisit events and choices that shaped his failed marriage, his life as a father, and his work as a scholar of middling achievement. Through his own desperate and confused flailing in the aftermath of the bombing, Lee becomes further ensnared in the FBI's attempts to find the bomber, and this beam of suspicion is ruinous. The churned-up regrets from his past bring Lee to an examination of extremes in his own life as he tries to exonerate himself, face his tormentor from his past, and atone for his failings.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Susan Choi’s American Woman (**** Nov/Dec 2003), a Pulitzer Prize finalist, fictionalized the abduction of Patty Hearst; here, she successfully tackles terrorism in an alienated America. Praised by the New York Times Book Review as “combining the unhurried pleasures of certain classics with the jittery tensions of more recent fiction,” A Person of Interest is more notable for its acute psychological insight and focus on one man’s discovery of himself than for its whodunit elements. A few reviewers faulted the flashbacks and ending and thought the novel too ambitious for its central character, but the majority commended Choi’s piercing exploration of how terrorism leads both to alienation and self-knowledge.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• MP3 CD
• Publisher: Blackstone Audio Inc.; Unabridged edition (January 31, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 143320861X
• ISBN-13: 978-1433208614
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,011,885 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Cheap Bell Peppers and Beef, May 25, 2008

By 

Daitokuji31 (Black Glass) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Person of Interest: A Novel (Hardcover)

Dr. Lee works at a second rate university's mathematics department in which its professors know that they are second rate and that they will never attain recognition for their work as professors, especially younger, more brilliant professors at universities with bigger names. However, their department does have one shining star, Dr. Hendley, a young professor in the department's nascent computer science section. Loquacious, beloved by his students who gather around his office in droves, in a solid relationship with an attractive lady professor, and at the top of his field, the sky is the limit for Hendley. It is for these reasons and more that Lee dislikes Hendley, and it is for this reason that Lee does not feel sorrow when Hendley is seriously wounded by a mail bomb explosion in the office next to his own, but almost a sense of joy, because deep in Lee's being is a deep-rooted jealousy for those who possess things that he does not.

In his sixties, twice divorced, his second wife, a Japanese woman, took most of his possessions, and nearly estranged from his daughter, Dr. Lee, on the outside, is a misanthropic, miserly old man who most people avoid coming in contact with. However, underneath this exterior is a lonely man who keeps his door slightly ajar hoping that a student will visit him during his office hours, hoping that his daughter will visit him, and living in the memory of his time spent with his first wife who is not deceased. It is this loneliness that makes Dr. Lee jump at the opportunity to talk to the press, and state how horrible the perpetrator who sent the bomb is. He soaks in the glory of it all, but soon retreats back into his shell because he begins to feel guilty about the "joy" he felt when Hendley was harmed by the bomb, so he does not attend a school gathering the next day and also he does not attend Hendley's funeral after the noted professor passes away. Along with the guilt, Lee is also heavily weighed upon by a letter he receives, a letter from one Lewis Gaither, a man who attended graduate school at the same time Dr. Lee did and at one time had been his only friend that is until Gaither's wife Aileen left him to be with Lee. Terrified by how the bomb and letter parallel each other, Lee comes to believe that maybe he was the true target of the bomb and that an old grudge thirty years buried has come back. Yet, Lee has bigger problems. Because of his recalcitrance to see Hendley at the hospital and later attend his funeral, government investigators come to his home and soon he becomes "a person of interest", someone who might know about the bombing if not being the perpetrator himself. Soon, not trusted by his neighbors and peers, Lee comes to desire his old solitary life. Also, there is always the looming specter of Gaither, will he strike again?

I have rarely read a novel that spends as much time depicting the mental make up of a character. The reader soon learns a good portion of Lee's likes and dislikes and why he has such difficulty forming relationships with others. The readers also learns of events such as Lee's affair with Aileen while she was still married to Gaither and his personal betrayal of Gaither that eventually turns him into such a bitter man. However, because Choi is detailing such a bitter and frankly unlikable character, the book tends to become a bit tedious at times because the reader does not really care why Lee is bitter because he is such a jerk to everyone else. This aspect of the novel improves as Lee's personality softens towards the middle of the book, but the beginning is tough to bare. With this aspect in mind, the narratives of other characters such as Aileen during flashbacks and another character named Mark, whom, in my opinion, is the most likable character in the novel, are actually more enjoyable and easier to read than those dealing with Lee.

Aspects of Lee's personality aside, Choi's does a fine job of showing how society and the collective perceptions of society control an individual. When Meursault was on trial in Albert Camus's L'Étranger he was almost already found guilty by the court because he did not show emotion at the funeral of his mother. Because Lee did not put on a show of mourning like others, something he believed to be undignified for himself, as well as the memory of Hendley, he becomes a suspect because his coldness and is ostracized from the community in which he lived for thirty or more years.

While no means a great novel and in a number of ways not an enjoyable one, Choi has crafted a fine book detailing the life of a bitter, isolated man whose life is destroyed because he does not act like society believes he should.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A little slow to start with, but ultimately engrossing and very satisfying., March 15, 2008

By 

David M. Giltinan (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Person of Interest: A Novel (Hardcover)

For the day and a half or so that I spent reading this book last weekend, very little got done in my home. When I finally finished it on Sunday evening, all the subtle indicators of a misspent weekend were evident - dirty dishes in the sink, heaps of dirty laundry, piles of assorted tax-related documents still needing to be corraled into some semblance of order, and two less than gruntled kitties, whose reproaches were getting progressively more vocal. Having written that, I realise that saying a book is more interesting than household chores might be considered damning it with faint praise, so let me clarify - that's not what I mean - this book is engrossing, and you may find it an irresistible time-sink.

It's been widely, and generally favorably, reviewed. I think the praise is well-deserved. Susan Choi writes beautifully, and was remarkably effective in making me care about Professor Lee, the central character, despite his many flaws and almost total lack of empathy. The basic plot outline - Lee comes under suspicion in the investigation of the death of a colleague who died following a Unabomber-style attack - is sketched in most reviews of the book, so I won't dwell on it here. The plot is not really the book's strong point - it is a little haphazard, with some aspects that don't seem completely plausible. But that hardly matters, it really just serves to provide the framework for Choi's in-depth, fascinating, and completely convincing character study of her flawed protagonist.

In the novel, Lee is a math professor; I spent four years of graduate school studying mathematical statistics. At certain points in the book I would find myself thinking - "she's exaggerating - nobody could be that lacking in empathy". But then, I'd do a mental rundown of my own class roster, and come up with at least two or three characters who were even weirder. Graduate study in the mathematical sciences does not, after all, tend to attract the raving extroverts of this world. So I think that Choi does get her character essentially right; her father being a math professor was presumably of some help in this regard.

A final note: the book is highly reminiscent of Heinrich Böll's 1974 novel, "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum", adapted for film in 1975 by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta (and later as a 1984 made for TV movie in the U.S., starring Marlo Thomas and Kris Kristofferson). Both books focus on a central character whose natural reserve and desire for privacy result in demonization and suspicion by the press and the authorities. I had a summer job in Berlin in 1975, and there was much lively debate about Böll's book and the film adaptation. One can only dream of a similarly engaged debate in the U.S.; Choi's book should at least provoke readers to think about the questions involved.

I highly recommend "A Person of Interest".

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very insightful, March 28, 2008

By 

J. Grattan "Ideas can move the world" (Lawrenceville, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Person of Interest: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book is a highly poignant examination of how the combination of personality, circumstances, otherness, and a climate of hysteria can result in becoming a "person of interest" to law enforcement agencies, unleashing both official and community forces that can virtually destroy a life regardless of ultimate guilt. When aging professor Lee, teaching mathematics at a small mid-Western college, is nearly killed by the blast from a mail-bomb opened by a colleague in the adjacent office, his strained relationships in the dept, his Asian background, his failure to evince sufficient sympathy, and his nervous behavior around authorities make him a convenient target.

The author really gets into the mind of Professor Lee as he flashes back through his life regarding his secondary professional status, his resentments and insecurities, his concern with appearances, and his failed relationships both professional and marital. Lee is not a particularly sympathetic character, but the author very carefully, even tediously, captures the life of a man who seemed to be perpetually maladjusted. It is not surprising that his reaction to an unsigned letter shortly after the bombing, believing that it came from a former colleague seeking some sort of revenge because Lee had absconded with his wife some thirty years prior, generates suspicion.

The book can go rather slowly: the writing is not without its complexity and dexterity. The hunt for the bomber occurs mostly in the background, as Lee's plight occupies the front stage. The book is not a "thriller"; it is a psychological profile of a man set adrift from his precarious comfort zone. Don't read the book for its action. The connection to the Unabomber story is implied, but is hardly key to the book.