A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi and Suzanne Choi

Book Overview

A compelling story of a mad bomber, a suspect scientist, and paranoia in the age of terror from the National Book Award finalist and author of Trust Exercise and My Education Professor Lee, an... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670018465
• ISBN13: 9780670018468
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 356 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

book of major interest

It's not clear if the title character in this book has the first name or last name of Lee, as that's his only moniker throughout the novel. This lack of a full name emphasizes Lee's academic stature as one of the "shorter poppies." The taller poppies, or those with a more flamboyant presence in the world of mathematics, are being lopped off by a mail bomber. The latest victim is Rick Hendley, a popular Computer Science professor whose office is next door to Lee's. Lee has mixed emotions about Hendley's demise, as he has always envied the constant stream of traffic to Hendley's office. Still, despite the depiction of Lee as a nondescript tenured professor at a nondescript Midwestern college, Lee has had a pretty interesting life. He emigrated from Japan as a young man and later stole the wife (Aileen) of a grad school friend (Lewis Gaither). When Lee receives an anonymous letter that attracts the attention of the FBI, suddenly he is a persona non grata with his colleagues and his neighbors. What's so fascinating here is that Lee and I drew completely different conclusions about who sent the letter, and I think it was Choi's intention to show that Lee's long-harbored guilt interferes with his ability to be objective about both the letter's contents and its authorship. The plot becomes Kafkaesque as Lee's life unravels at the hands of the media and the rumor mill, and it drags a little while catching us up on Aileen's son with Lewis. Born John, now known as Mark, he's totally unaware that the woman who raised him is not his biological mother. The book is ultimately a story of redemption as Lee tries to compensate for the dreadful mistakes of his past and finally appreciates the richness of his own life.

Very insightful

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.

A little slow to start with, but ultimately engrossing and very satisfying.

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".

A suspenseful narrative, almost a literary mystery novel

Susan Choi's unique talent is to take fiction based loosely on real people or real events and make her fictional portrayal of those real-life counterparts simultaneously more provocative and, somehow, even more true than the events that inspired them. In her last novel, AMERICAN WOMAN, Choi reimagined the Patty Hearst kidnapping case. Now, in A PERSON OF INTEREST, she conflates the Unabomber murders with the Wen Ho Lee spy controversy, creating a case that propels its protagonist into two most uncomfortable situations --- becoming a reluctant object of notoriety and being forced to confront his own sad past. Lee is an aging professor of mathematics at an unnamed, distinctly undistinguished Midwestern college. Frustrated with his department chair's repeated entreaties for Lee to retire and make way for a younger (untenured) professor with a lower salary, Lee also finds himself becoming increasingly resentful of the department's new "hotshot" professor. Hendley is a young, handsome, charismatic computer scientist who practically has to turn students away from office hours, while Lee can't entice any pupils to stop in for course advice, let alone a friendly chat. When Hendley is seriously wounded by a package bomb delivered to his office while Lee is in the office right next door, Lee is shocked by his own initial reaction to the blast: "Oh, good." Coming face to face with his obvious antipathy toward Hendley, Lee is also drawn back to reflect on his own history. In a field where geniuses emerge only in their 20s, where 30-year-olds are over the hill, Lee fought an uphill battle from the beginning. An immigrant from an East Asian country, Lee came to the United States as a young man; despite learning excellent English (so adeptly that he can correct native speakers' grammar), he was always at a disadvantage, starting graduate school at a large Midwestern university at a much more advanced age than many of his hotshot colleagues. Lee's history of scholastic disappointment is also wrapped up in his personal history. Twice divorced from two very different women (about whom he has very different memories and responses), Lee is now estranged from his only daughter. Living in a nearly empty house (his second ex-wife took almost everything of value, including most of the furniture and the paintings on the walls) in a sterile suburb, suffering from chronic insomnia, Lee comes to terms with his own irrelevance nearly every day of his life. At first, Lee's propulsion into fame following Hendley's attack is welcomed; he relishes his professorial appearance on national television. But when his fame draws the attention of an unwelcome figure from Lee's past, Lee retreats unhappily into his own history. And when Lee's suspicious behavior draws the attention of the FBI, who name him a "Person of Interest" in the bombing case, he comes to reflect on the extent to which he has become an outsider, not only in his country and community, but perhaps even to himself

Interesting Person of Interest

Another "ripped from past headlines" novel by Susan Choi -- what makes this novel so intriguing is the internalization she provides to the main characters. Not only Professor Lee, but subsidiary characters such as his first wife, Aileen, the catalyst for all that follows. Sometimes the details are a bit overwhelming, but for the most part, the plot is fascinating and moves quickly. It did take longer to read than I thought it would, but I never felt bored. As mentioned in the above review from the Washington Post, the final pages contain some elements that do not jibe with the rest of the story, but the final scene itself is poignant.