A Person of Interest: A Novel

by Susan Choi Narrated by Bernadette Dunne

Overview

With its propulsive drive, vividly realized characters, and profound observations about soul and society, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Susan Choi's novel is as thrilling as it is lyrical, and it confirms her place as one of the most important novelists chronicling the American experience.

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. While Lee becomes further ensnared in the FBI's attempts to find the bomber, the churned-up regrets from his past bring him 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.

Intricately plotted and psychologically acute, A Person of Interest exposes the fault lines of paranoia and dread that have fractured American life and asks how far one man must go to escape his regrets.

Editorial Reviews

Vogue

... 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.

Dallas Morning News

[T]errible honesty, surrounded by unanswered questions, is what makes Susan Choi's third novel so compelling.

Francine Prose

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.
— The New York Times Book Review

Los Angeles Times

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.

Time Out New York

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.

San Francisco Chronicle

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.'

Village Voice

Stunning . . . Choi's writing is elegant and surprisingly expansive.

GQ

Pulitzer Prize finalist Susan Choi returns with a straight-up thriller ... gripping, smart.

Cleveland Plain-Dealer

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.

Salon

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.

Poets & Writers

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.

Donna Seaman

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.
— Booklist

O The Oprah Magazine

[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.

Washington City Paper

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.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

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.

New York Sun

Engrossing . . . masterful.

Bloomberg News

Beneath . . . less-than-cheery broad strokes Choi places a rich layer of well- chosen details.

Washington Post

Choi's work unfolds like a Dostoyevskian study of guilt and self-doubt, plumbing the depths of the paranoia that ensues when one's identity is threatened.

The Village Voice

Stunning. . . A Person of Interest succeeds on so many levels: as character study, as literary thriller, but most of all, as an inquest into what constitutes identity.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Susan Choi's "A Person of Interest" has all the fine ingredients of a page-turner, but its true power lies in its subtle psychological depiction of alienation, guilt and redemption in these edgy times of mistrust and public paranoia. Choi, whose "American Woman" was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2004, 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. "A Person of Interest" never loses its way, as Choi propels the story in a narrative style that is clear, confident and at times lyrical.
—Marx Swanholm,

The Oprah Magazine O

An explosive story of a mad bomber and a suspect scientist: In Choi's eloquent, penetrating novel, the two stories are brought together . . . 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.

Kirkus Reviews

Choi (The Foreign Student, 1998, etc.) draws on the Unabomber case for her awkward third novel, about a campus bombing and a beleaguered Asian-American professor. Lee is an aging tenured math professor at an undistinguished state university in the Midwest. The adjoining office belongs to Rick Hendley, a much younger man with a much bigger reputation, a hotshot computer scientist loved by his students and envied by the unloved Lee. When a mail bomb explodes in Hendley's face, Lee feels a "terrible gladness." He does not visit Hendley in the hospital; when the man dies, he does not attend the campus memorial service. Petty and self-absorbed, Lee is no nicer now than he was all those years ago in grad school, when he was befriended by an evangelizing Christian, Lewis Gaither, and promptly stole his wife Aileen. Out of the blue, a letter arrives from Gaither, suggesting they resume their friendship. Could there be a connection between this letter and the bombing? An FBI agent seems to think so, and his suspicions are intensified when Lee lies to him about his relationship with Gaither. Choi alternates between the investigation and Lee's marriage to Aileen, doomed once Lee refused to show any interest in her baby John, fathered by Gaither, who later absconded with him. This can of worms acts as a severe distraction from Lee's current troubles, which multiply once the FBI declares him a person of interest (though not a suspect) and the media and neighbors harass him. (Echoes here of the Richard Jewell/1996 Atlanta Olympics story.) The abrupt introduction of the now adult John is a further distraction. The story does gain some momentum with Lee's cross-country dash to rendezvous with Gaither,who has now issued a Manifesto, like the Unabomber. But the climax, in the snowy Idaho woods, defies belief on several counts, among them Lee's last-minute makeover as a potential martyr. Lee's soul is too small to carry the novel, despite the author's astute observations.

From the Publisher

"A tour de force . . . universal and raw and irresistibly sympathetic."
-The Washington Post Book World

"With nuance, psychological acuity, and pitch-perfect writing, she tells the large-canvas story of paranoia in the age of terror and the smaller (but no less important) story of the cost of failed dreams and the damage we do to one another in the name of love."
-Los Angeles Times

"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

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169897463
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/31/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.

Videos