Feldman's Faves: September 8, 2025

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

I hope those of you with kids in school have settled into your post-summer routine. When my kids were young I ran a business called DUBER (Dad Uber) but never made any money at it. Luckily for me I had a law degree as a back up plan….

This week is always an exciting one for Toronto. TIFF is in full swing and its fun to go stargazing. As a life long fan of SCTV and of Planes Trains and Automobiles I am most excited about the John Candy biopic, which looks fantastic.

Finally, just a friendly reminder of our BAGEL BREAKFAST this morning. Thank you, Alex!

No theme this week – just topics of interest.

FLASHLIGHT By: Susan Choi – I realize that I would be a terrible judge.  Whatever argument I hear last I would likely choose as the winner. Whatever book I read last is the one that I think should win the prize. In this case I am talking about the Booker Prize Long List where Flashlight by Susan Choi finds itself. This ambitious novel takes place across multiple continents, multiple political regimes and focuses on the complex characters and their highly dysfunctional relationships. It also brings to light a very interesting and unknown aspect of North Korean history that is simply shocking. In other words, the kind of book that should one day become a movie. Choi’s writing style is very unsettling.  The book moves from time and location in a way that assumes you are following, which is not always easy at first but eventually it all makes sense.  The scope of the story and the way it is written makes Flashlight a true original. As one reviewer notes, “The millennium is back – not just in fast fashion or TikTok remixes, but in the mood of American fiction. Think peak Chabon and Eugenides; the intellectual gymnastics of Helen DeWitt; the last profane and puckish gasp of Tom Robbins. That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans. Joyce Carol Oates channeling Marilyn Monroe. Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah. You can feel that early-00s energy jostling through a new crop of American novels: Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle are top-shelf examples. They’re big in all kinds of wonderful, infuriating ways: antic, overstuffed and richly peopled. While it’s less hyperactive than some of its book-fellows, Susan Choi’s Flashlight still has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold. Stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, Choi’s sixth novel reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires. Flashlight first appeared in the New Yorker as a short story – a standoff in a psychiatrist’s office. The novel opens here too. It is the late 1970s: 10-year-old Louisa has been dragged in for a consultation, and she’s not playing nice. She waits out the clock, evading, deflecting; a tight little knot of fury. “This room is full of tricks to get children to talk, but you’re too smart for them,” the doctor flatters her. “I’m too smart for compliments,” Louisa snaps back. Louisa’s father has drowned, and her mother has turned into a strange new invalid. What the girl feels defies grief or sympathy. This isn’t mourning, it’s mutiny; and it will take more than some avuncular desk jockey to tame her. While the doctor is distracted, she steals an emergency flashlight from his office and smuggles it home – a low-stakes theft with high-voltage meaning. The night Louisa’s father disappeared into the water, he was holding a flashlight.

Portentous torches will appear throughout these pages (it’s not the subtlest of metaphors for a novel about absence and secrecy). There’s one at a seance, its battery case loosened to summon some otherworldly flickering. Another at an archaeological dig in Paris. This is a story told in brief illuminations, like a child spinning a torch in a dark bedroom. Slices of light; slices of life. We begin with a flashback to Louisa’s parents, meeting them before they meet each other. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean raised in Japan, is a child of postwar limbo. Caught between two nations, and claimed by neither, he trades his borderland life for a blank American slate – or so he thinks (America has other ideas). Louisa’s father will be known by many names over the course of his life – Hiroshi, Seok, the Crab – but none of them will quite belong to him. Louisa will know him as Serk, an anglicized version of his Korean name.  Louisa’s mother, Anne, is an obstinate, spiky creature, allergic to expectation. Pregnant at 19, she gives birth to a child she’s not permitted to keep, and her adult life shapes itself around her son’s absence, like a house built around a locked room. Louisa will inherit her mother’s bone-deep stubbornness – twin contrarians. They make an implacable, inscrutable pair, Serk and Anne; secret-keepers to the core, lonely apart and lonelier together (“Anne the odd white woman who had married the foreigner; Serk the odd foreigner who had married a white woman”). When Serk drowns, he leaves behind a silence so complete it swallows the past whole. And so Louisa is left with two absent parents: one right in front of her; the other near mythic. “The sum of things she knew about her father could fit inside the sum of things she’ll never know about him an infinite number of times,” Choi writes. “The things she knows are as meagre as a pair of backgammon dice rattling in their cup.” Flashlight is a study of absence – absence of narrative, of inheritance, of place, of affection. Who are you, it asks, when there’s no story to inherit, no history to claim? How might that void be filled, or inhabited or weaponized? It’s a year for canon building, and as the best-of-the-century (so far) lists are tallied, Choi’s previous novel, 2019’s Trust Exercise, remains firmly on mine. It begins as a high-school drama, libidinous and gossipy, but midway through, Choi triggers a controlled implosion. From the wreckage, another story emerges: one about power, authorship and blame. Truth isn’t fixed, Choi shows us here – it’s framed. I love this novel’s confident chaos, its metafictional brio. Flashlight delivers a comparable jolt – a truth-rattling rupture. We feel it building with a cruel inevitability, and when it arrives, it shifts the novel’s moral (and political) terrain. To spoil the reveal would be churlish. The question is whether the novel can withstand the shock. It can – just. Choi is one of contemporary literature’s great demolition artists, and her emotional foundations hold. She can build as well as she detonates. Choi gives her cast the room they need to live; to be more than vessels for political wrangling. The opening of Flashlight isn’t the only set piece that could stand alone – and tall – as a short story.”  Flashlight a big bold epic novel that makes you feel you are in one way witnessing macro-geopolitical history while at the same time engaging in psychoanalysis of some very deeply disturbed and complex characters. I understand why Choi’s book has been long-listed for this year’s Booker and should be on the short list as well. Here’s a good review from the NYT - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/books/review/susan-choi-flashlight.html

Acquired - Alphabet Inc. – So now we are on Part 2 of 3 of the Google (now Alphabet) story. An epic PODCAST is necessary for this unicorn of all unicorns. I love this episode because the boys from Acquired go deep into the various products beyond Search that make Alphabet the absolute beast it has become. Gmail. Google Maps YOUTUBE and ANDROID alone could be monster standalone businesses but in this company they are small pieces of the giant puzzle that at the end of the day is about monetizing search. Just brilliant…. And this episode covers the post IPO to 2015 period, that is the period prior to them taking on the challenge of AI. This is a long one – luckily I was on a five hour plane ride last week so it was meant to be….Here is an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “In its first six years from 1998 to 2004, Google built one of the greatest products of all time (and certainly the greatest business of all time) with Search. Then in its next six years from 2005 to 2011, Google built seven (!) more billion+ user products: Gmail, Maps, Drive and Docs, YouTube, Chrome, Android, and Photos — all either started from scratch internally or acquired as startups that were still in their infancy. This six-year period of wild innovation STILL stands unmatched in technology history… no other tech company counts more than four billion+ user products in its portfolio total. And of course, this “Google 2.0” era culminated in the transformation of the very company itself into Alphabet. So the question we answer today is… how did they do it?? And why? What was the strategy that led a once “pure play” search company into such far flung fields as email, mapping, funny cat videos and operating systems? We unpack the brilliant (and sometimes accidental) strategies behind each product, the simultaneous three-front war Google fought against Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook, and the spectacular failure of Google Plus that nearly destroyed the company's culture — before ultimately setting the stage for both Alphabet and the AI revolution to come.”  https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/acquired/id1050462261?i=1000723582204

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon