'A Person of Interest' by Susan Choi

A Novel

Susan Choi

Viking: 356 pp., $24.95

Abomb explodes in the office of a popular math professor at a Midwestern college. The event is ultimately linked to similar acts of terror at other universities around the country, and the bomber sends out an impassioned, deeply disturbed mea culpa about the evils of modern technology.

It's an unsettlingly familiar story, and, as with the Patty Hearst saga in her previous novel, "American Woman," the gifted and original Susan Choi uses this particularly contemporary malignancy as the backbone of her new novel, "A Person of Interest."

Whereas many novelists employing sensational devices upon which to hang a plot fail to reveal much more than we already know from having read the newspapers and chatting around the water cooler, 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. 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.

Choi's focus is not on the perpetrator of the terror or his victim but on a bit player in the drama -- one who at first glance seems beside the point. Lee, Choi's protagonist, is the victim's colleague -- a 65-year-old math professor and Asian immigrant who is reaching the end of an undistinguished career at a second-rate college.

Professor Lee (we never learn his first name) is a socially awkward man, given to blurting out uncomfortable truths at inopportune moments, and his seething emotions are buried beneath a lifetime of repression. Having failed at two marriages, he lives alone in a faceless suburban development, in a house he's done nothing to personalize. Most of the rooms are empty of furniture. He eats the same meal nearly every night, at his desk. He is estranged from his only daughter and seems to have no relationships outside of superficial connections to his departmental colleagues. He is a disappointed, detached man, full of regret and anger.