A Person of Interest: A Novel [BARGAIN PRICE] (Hardcover)

by Susan Choi (Author) "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..." (more)
Key Phrases: Agent Morrison, Lewis Gaither, Jeff Trulli (more...)

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 the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

Susan Choi looks for essential American characters in the most peculiar places. Five years ago, she wrote a novel about Patty Hearst called American Woman that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and now she's back with A Person of Interest, a piercing story about the Unabomber that's one of the most remarkable novels to have emerged from our age of terror. American Woman followed the Hearst case closely, but Choi's success this time has nothing to do with fidelity to the historical record; indeed, the anti-technology assassin, Ted Kaczynski, and the criminal investigation to stop him comprise only a small, late part of this novel. Instead, what makes A Person of Interest so brilliant and unsettling is Choi's creation of an old man who becomes an object of suspicion.

Twice divorced, friendless, the man known only as Dr. Lee is an embittered math professor at a mediocre university somewhere in the Midwest. He seems no more endearing than Emma Bovary or Humbert Humbert, but he's just as mesmerizing. In his youth, he emigrated from a repressive Asian country (never specified), and now with his slightly odd, distinctly unfriendly demeanor, he scratches at the xenophobia lying beneath our liberal sensibilities. But in the depths of Lee's peculiar foreignness, Choi touches something universal and raw and irresistibly sympathetic. Her merciless knowledge of him, her sardonic analysis of his anxiety, his shame and his compulsive jealousy result in a cringe-inducing performance, a tour de force that would cause Flaubert to cry out, "Dr. Lee, c'est moi!"

The novel opens with an explosion in the office next to Lee that's so powerful it knocks him off his chair. As he sits crumpled on the floor waiting for paramedics to arrive, he knows it must have been a package bomb. "The explosion had not breached the wall," Choi writes. "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 incinerated victim next door is Dr. Hendley, a young hot-shot computer scientist, "an exemplar of a new breed of professor, worldly, engaged, more likely to publish in a magazine full of ads for a mysterious item called PlayStation than in a moribund university quarterly, read only by the frail, graying men (and rare woman) whose work was included that month." Lee has always found Hendley's popularity -- with the students, other faculty members, even the world at large -- annoying, but until the explosion, he'd never realized the intensity of his hatred. Lee "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."

So begins a story of ever increasing self-consciousness and self-loathing. Step by step, Choi follows Lee through the horrible days after the bombing in a narrative voice that manages to channel his bile while also satirizing it with blistering commentary. At the hospital where reporters are waiting for word of Hendley's condition, Lee delivers a rousing condemnation of the attack, but he finds the media glare and his colleagues' sympathy deeply irritating. Among other things, he's infuriated by the realization that he's not important enough to merit assassination.

Conflicted and disturbed by his own pettiness, he avoids the grief counselors, the public expressions of remorse, the lachrymose well-wishers, but his remoteness only makes him seem more peculiar, then suspicious. Try as he might -- "in a furnace of fury and shame" -- he just can't behave in the way he knows people want him to. "His perpetual crime," Choi writes, "was the failure to keep up appearances."

In the middle of this ordeal, he receives a taunting letter from an old acquaintance named Gaither, an evangelical Christian he hasn't seen since they were graduate students together. At this point, Choi breaks the story along two different timelines: The letter draws Lee's mind back to those early years in America and his broken friendship with Gaither. The more he ruminates on their hurt feelings, the more convinced he becomes that his old friend is the assassin and that the bomb Hendley opened was, in fact, intended for him. In the claustrophobic atmosphere of Lee's paranoia, it's a conclusion he finds at once terrifying and flattering. (Choi recently told a reporter that her own father, also a mathematician, went to graduate shool with Ted Kaczynski in the '60s.)

Meanwhile, Lee's increasingly nervous behavior attracts the attention of the FBI, which considers him "a person of interest." Of course, that added scrutiny, magnified by his neighbors' eagerness to ostracize him (or worse), only exaggerates his peculiarity. (Readers may be reminded of the devastating investigation of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee.) Choi notes coolly that Lee suffers from "the immigrant's sense of hopeless illegitimacy and impending exposure." But I don't care if your family came over on the Mayflower -- only the most pathologically overconfident person could read these flawless scenes without resonating to Lee's anxiety.

Amid the increasingly aggressive FBI investigation, some of the long flashbacks to Lee's graduate school years and his failed marriages feel like unneeded detours, but ultimately the two story lines play off each other in the most fascinating ways. The sweaty pace of the contemporary thriller complements the quiet tragedy of the older, domestic drama, and through it all runs Choi's scathing, illuminating scrutiny.

The novel's concluding scenes mark a surprising, not entirely successful shift. The plot, so careful and precise up to this point, grows oddly rushed and surreal: The climax passes in an unlikely, blurry scene. What's more strange, though, is the tempering of Choi's tone. Her mordant voice falls away, and for the remaining pages Lee is described by a gentle, even sentimental narrator whose voice is difficult to square with the bulk of the novel's steely wit. Perhaps Choi is merely showing a little mercy after holding her antihero on the end of a pin for so many pages, but it seems like a failure of nerve or the intervention of those Hollywood bosses who order up endings in response to preview questionnaires. No matter -- something to argue about with the book club. Choi remains, more than ever, a writer of interest.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (January 31, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670018465
• ASIN: B001C2E3R6
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #603,032 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 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)

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 7 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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars mea culpa, March 11, 2008

By	Ted Feit (Long Beach, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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

This novel presents me with a dilemma. I found it slow reading and perplexing, yet all the reviews I have read were laudatory. I found the plot and characters confusing, yet reviewers praised the novel in the highest terms. In fact, I didn't find the story or the characters interesting, and in many ways illogical. How could that be?

The premise is a relatively simple one. Professor Lee comes to the United States from Asia in his late 20's, goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in mathematics, becomes a professor, gains tenure. So far so good. Where he goes wrong is having an affair with the wife of a fellow graduate student, who later marries and divorces him after they have a daughter. He goes on living alone with little or no interaction with the community or fellow workers. A bomb kills a star professor in the next office, and Lee later becomes a person of interest to FBI investigators, with resultant publicity and its effect on his reputation on and off campus.

The novel apparently is a psychological study of Lee. But as it plods on, all kinds of extraneous information is foisted on the reader. While it had redeeming qualities and fairly good writing, I found it boring and poorly conceived. Others didn't. C'est la vie.