Following up on a profoundly angry book that made her a literary star is the daunting challenge Susan Choi faces with Flashlight, her sixth novel. Its predecessor, Trust Exercise (2019), broke out in a way that her earlier fiction, though well received, hadn’t. The success of the book, a formally inventive story about a popular teacher sexually abusing a student at an elite arts school in the 1980s, may have had to do with its timeliness—it appeared at the height of the #MeToo movement—but certainly stemmed from its fierceness. One of its three narrators, Karen, incarnates its fury. In her section, the novel’s best, rage crackles from every controlled, precise line.

For Karen’s author, such rage was a real departure. The characters in Choi’s previous fiction tend to treat anger as an unwelcome guest. They repress it, relegating it to the realm of the unacknowledged in hopes that there, it might shrivel and die. Regina, the narrator of My Education (2013), reveals in one seething passage that she was raped four years before the novel begins—a memory that shifts the story—but Choi relates the assault in such a rushed, muddled way that even comprehending what happened takes two readings. The question of what violent feelings Regina might harbor, Choi quite consciously leaves unexplored.

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The leap from Regina to Karen might seem colossal, but Choi told The Guardian that the 2016 election led her to the latter’s creation. “Karen came from feeling so angry all the time. I specifically felt as though someone had taken a story that was my story—the story of my country, my origins. I’m the daughter of an immigrant, I’m the granddaughter of immigrants, I’ve always been so proud of that.” Trust Exercise isn’t about immigration, but Choi’s comment conveyed the broad sense of betrayal that underlies Karen’s anger at her abuser and his admirers. It also, perhaps, foreshadowed Flashlight, which is about immigration on a global scale.

Some of Choi’s earlier novels feature characters who have immigrated to the United States, but those books all begin after the move. Flashlight, by contrast, follows a family as its members migrate, variously, from Korea to Japan, Japan to North Korea, Japan to the United States, and—in some cases—back, each seeking what’s generally seen as a very American freedom: the right to learn about, and become, their truest selves in a new home. By telling this story on an ambitious new historical and geographical canvas, Choi not only detaches this quest from any one nation, but makes mobility her theme. In doing so, she has found a very different way to handle anger. No longer an unwanted intrusion or the dominant mood, it has become a tunnel that her characters travel through, a long and dark but inescapable part of getting somewhere they need to go.

Choi gives her three protagonists—Serk, a professor at a midwestern college; Anne, his wife; and Louisa, their daughter—many reasons to be angry. Serk’s trace back to his childhood. Born in Japan during World War II to Korean parents who’d emigrated from their colonized homeland in search of opportunity, he’s devastated, at age 6, by the loss of “his belief in his Japaneseness.” (On learning he’s Korean, he says to his mother, “But what are Koreans?”) He dreams of assimilation while his family’s devotion to Korea’s communist cause grows in response not just to Japanese discrimination, but also to the U.S.-backed South Korean army’s massacre of civilians on the parents’ home island of Jeju. Eventually, Serk’s parents and most of his siblings move to North Korea. Serk won’t go. Alone in Tokyo, he tries to stifle his resentment at the prejudice that drove his family away, telling himself that sometimes

Materially speaking, Serk’s strategy largely works. Though he can’t assimilate, he succeeds well enough academically to emigrate and get a professorship. But emotionally, his efforts take a toll. As Flashlight progresses, Choi shows Serk’s transformation into a glacial spouse, a jittery parent, a person so afraid of his anger that when he feels it, he gets angrier still. Such men aren’t new in her writing: Serk shares these traits with Lee, the protagonist of A Person of Interest (2008), but Choi never calls on Lee to spend time alone with his emotions. Serk has to—though only after he is, shockingly, kidnapped from a Japanese beach by North Koreans while teaching in Japan for a semester.

Such abductions really did happen from 1977 to 1983, which North Korea acknowledged only in 2002. Little is known about most kidnapping victims’ fates, but Choi imagines years of horror for Serk and grief for Louisa and Anne, who think he’s dead. Choi lets the reader in on his survival through Flashlight’s nonlinear structure, which may be, if not the most experimental way she’s told a story, the trickiest approach she’s taken. She weaves back and forth in time, frequently shifting her focus from one character to another. This allows her to hide some secrets from her readers, some from her characters, and some from both. Only the omniscient narrator knows what’s going on: Everyone else is at sea, and furious about it.

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But nobody in Flashlight stays mad, no matter how complex or layered their anger may be. In captivity, Serk has no choice but to sit still with his anger—not only at his jailers, who force him to teach them Japanese, but at the Japanese discrimination that marked his childhood and his family’s lives. In the process, he finds that he can allow the emotion to wane—and that, when he does, it’s replaced by others, such as love for his daughter, that help him survive. An ocean away, Anne makes a similar discovery. She gets diagnosed with multiple sclerosis not long after she concludes that Serk has drowned, and is understandably bitter at fate for visiting these ordeals upon her. Yet she discovers that holding on to an anger aimed at such a large, unreachable target is less satisfying than letting it go. Louisa is livid at losing both her father and the healthy version of her mother. Though she travels through her anger more slowly, she shares her parents’ capacity to let it evolve and diminish. Choi has never written about that process before. For the first time in her career, she shows herself interested above all in anger’s impermanence—and in the emotions that occupy the hole it leaves once it’s gone.

In the same way that Trust Exercise has Karen as its incarnation of anger, Flashlight has an incarnation of anger’s absence. In Anne’s youth, before she met Serk, she had a son, Tobias, custody of whom she ceded to his older, married father. Years later, he reenters her life, initially as a teenager consumed by rage that turns out to be the effect of a brain tumor, and then, post-surgery, as a preternaturally placid drifter, a young man given to “floating through the world like a mote.” Tobias is Flashlight’s court fool, a source of chaos, comedy, and pathos. He can’t fully take care of himself, which worries Anne and aggravates Louisa. It also reminds the reader that if anger can grow stagnant, so can its absence. The capacity to get mad, to rise to provocation, and to strike out against insult is not just a good thing but a goad to growth. On that front, Choi’s perspective hasn’t changed since Trust Exercise.

What has changed is her prose. The critic Ron Charles said of her in 2013 that “few other writers alive today make their sentences work so hard.” Before Trust Exercise, her writing was carefully balanced, sinuously elegant yet never showy. And then she swerved, compacting her sentences to convey anger, as in Karen’s blunt summation of her non-relationship with the mother who failed to protect her: “When I visit my brother, he doesn’t tell our mother I’m coming. When he visits me, he doesn’t tell her he’s going. He pretends that he’s traveling on business.” In Flashlight, she swerves again, expanding her prose further than ever before, packing an astonishing amount of beauty and meaning into her descriptions. Growing up, Serk steals from vendors “who sit like solemn stones beside their little piles of mountain ferns or frail carrots drawn slightly too soon from the dirt because the leisure to wait for a vegetable doesn’t exist anymore.” His mother accepts his haul silently, and his “father, who comes home every day in clothing so stiffened with dirt that his mother uses the hand broom to beat him all over like a rug before he undresses and joins them inside, is unaware of this system by which the evening soup bowl is enhanced.”

These detail-rich sentences thrive on patience. By slowing down her description of the vegetable market, Choi calls attention to the small amounts of loveliness present there, amid the devastation of war, and to the poverty that makes Serk steal and his mother allow it. By taking the time for Serk’s mother to beat his father like a rug, Choi puts her readers in the father’s place, on the threshold of the family home, waiting for the woman in charge to let us in. As the novel goes on, the more brutal a character’s conditions are, the more carefully Choi writes them, forcing readers to slow down and inhabit them. Her characters, too, have to pay close attention to their life; their survival depends on it. In a passage in which Serk, famished and desperate in a North Korean prison camp, discovers that he can trap and eat rodents, her descriptions of the geography around him—to say nothing of his joy once he has a belly full of rat—are almost too vivid to bear.

Here, in the rat stage, is when Serk gives up the last of his anger. Choi seems to draw on, or at least she echoes, Viktor Frankl, the psychologist and Holocaust survivor who maintained that the hallmark of humanity is “the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” When Serk summons the energy to catch rats to keep himself alive, the strength to notice his surroundings comes with it—and that, in turn, provides the hope he needs to try to escape. Just as anger could not do this for him, it can’t assuage Anne’s loneliness after Louisa leaves for college. Living alone for the first time, she becomes, through an inner process that mystifies her, someone so responsive to the outside world that what she sees around her counterbalances the physical and emotional pain she feels: She is genuinely uplifted by sunlight in her apartment and by a sighting of a circus elephant, “its ancient flanks as otherworldly as the moon, its eye as bright, the four stupendous steles of its legs bearing its hulk easily as the sky bears its clouds.” Remembering the elephant, Anne thinks simply, “That was the sort of thing you stayed alive for.”

If Choi had written Flashlight less lushly—if the elephant just had legs, not stupendous steles— Anne’s replacement of bitterness with appreciation would risk registering as corny uplift. So would the gratitude that comes to preoccupy Serk. Choi’s style conveys that the world, even at its worst, rewards devoted examination; her characters’ long arcs, meanwhile, remind readers that just because anger has ebbed doesn’t mean it’s gone. Louisa knows almost nothing of her father’s past as a Japanese colonial subject, and yet she inherits a version of his anger about it: The awareness that she will never know what his childhood was like festers.

Louisa’s emotions speak directly to Choi’s earlier work. In A Person of Interest, a character named Mark, on learning that his parents concealed his past, imagines discussing his grief and anger with a long-dead mentor. “If we don’t know the people we came from,” he muses, “how do we know who we are?” Choi eventually gives Mark the knowledge he wants, but in Flashlight, she denies it to Louisa—which is the realistic choice. When war, colonialism, and discrimination force people to migrate, family history all too often gets left behind. Japan’s occupation of Korea has this effect on Choi’s main characters, and Serk’s anger about it ripples throughout the book, becoming part of Louisa’s inheritance. But his and Anne’s ultimate bequest to their daughter is the ability to struggle against her resentment rather than sinking permanently into it. Doing so isn’t easy, but Choi’s characters manage it over and over. In fact, it’s what keeps them alive.