A person of interest A novel

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.

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: A Novel 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.