Summary
From an acclaimed novelist, an emotionally complex and riveting story of suspicion, innocence, and regretWhen a mail bomb explodes in the campus office next door, Lee, an Asian American math professor at a second-tier university in the Midwest, comes under suspicion. The authorities believe he may be the infamous "brain bomber," an elusive terrorist whose primary targets are prominent scientists and mathematicians.In the midst of campus tumult and grief over the star computer scientist who was killed by the bomb, Lee receives a disturbing letter from a figure in his past. Certain he is being targeted for revenge, he begins confronting key events in his life. Misunderstood by the people around him, Lee is not conscious that his behavior has begun to heighten suspicion in the minds of his colleagues, students, and neighbors, leading the FBI to designate him "a person of interest" and pushing his life and reputation to the verge of ruin.Intricately plotted and engrossing, A Person of Interest asks how far one man can run from his past, and explores the impact of scrutiny and suspicion in an age of terror. With its propulsive drive and vividly realized characters, Susan Choi's latest novel is as thrilling as it is lyrical, and confirms her place as one of the most important young novelists chronicling the American experience.
Media reviews
'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, The New York Times Book Review
'Choi deftly turns our gaze away from the obvious and takes us on a complicated and revealing journey into the alienated heart of modern American life Choi juggles suspense and psychological drama with an acrobatic dexterity.'
Los Angeles Times
'Susan Choi is a writer with rare gifts. She has an eye for the telling details that reveal complicated, fully developed characters as well as an equally acute sensitivity for the times we live in.'
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Stunning . . . Choi's writing is elegant and surprisingly expansive."
–Village Voice
'Pulitzer Prize finalist Susan Choi returns with a straight-up thriller gripping, smart.'
–GQ
' cultural provocateur a la DeLillo, but with a keen sense of psychological nuance. . . . Choi has the all-too-rare talent of making the political feel unsettlingly personal.'
Vogue
'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 backgroun 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.'
Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred
'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.
Publishers Weekly, starred
"[An] eloquent, penetrating novel . . . Behind the headlines that trigger Choi's imagination, she sees intricate, difficult lives; she sees romance and error and dignity and pain and finally, as with Lee, she sees the possibility for redemption."
O, The Oprah Magazine
"No matter the year in which her novels are set, Choi's subject is contemporary American as much as it is America's past. The result is historical fiction with present-day relevance."
Poets & Writers
'Masterful. . . . Choi seems to be working in a genre all her own: politically astute, historically based, and dramatically propulsive. [T]he suspense is solidly grounded in character, not twists.' Its engine is the anxiety of a man whose sense of himself must be dismantled if he's going to survive, who only gets his life back after a maniac blows it up.'
-Salon
'Choi's writing probes the depths of Lee's consciousness, as well as the collective consciousness of his small town, and reveals things about Lee he has not yet bothered to articulate to himself. . . . What is compelling about Choi's characterizations is her sense of restraint . . . A Person of Interest is psychologically rich. The relationships fleshed out in Lee's life – especially his romance with his first wife, and the conflicts in and around their marriage – are moving and compelling. The novel is a testament to Choi's deft handling of her material. She reworks the classic detective novel as literary fiction, and shows how, given the right set of circumstances, any one of us could be labeled a person of interest.''
-San Francisco Chronicle
'Choi is wonderful at limning how strangeness roots in loneliness. . . . A Person of Interest brims with gifted writing, masterful observation, and propulsive plot. It sends Lee out to help solve the identity of the bomber, a role far more satisfactory than any lawsuit. In the barricaded past that the bombing stirs up, Lee finds a way to reassemble something essential, making for an unorthodox and deeply moving tale. The year is young, but A Person of Interest is the best new novel I've read in 2008.' -Cleveland Plain-Dealer
'Engrossing, intricately plotted . . . . While A Person of Interest crackles with the sensationalism of the actual Unabomber events, it is anchored by its quiet portrait of a man in the melancholic twilight of his career, beset with regrets and professional jealousies.'
-Time Out New York
'[T]errible honesty, surrounded by unanswered questions, is what makes Susan Choi's third novel so compelling.' -Dallas Morning News
'Engrossing . . . masterful.'
-New York Sun
'Beneath . . . less-than-cheery broad strokes Choi places a rich layer of well-chosen details.'
-Bloomberg News
'If Henry James had lived in the age of pulp noirs, he might have wound up writing books a little like Susan Choi's third novel, A Person of Interest. . . . Choi's paragraphs are heavy, dense, carefully shaped mini-essays . . . her portrait of Lee's paranoia is . . . exacting and affecting.'
-Washington City Paper
