Books

When a mail bomb explodes in the faculty office next door, it shocks Professor Lee into the realization that he never cared much for his neighbor Hendley anyway.

Such terrible honesty, surrounded by unanswered questions, is what makes Susan Choi's third novel so compelling. A Person of Interest centers on Lee, a quiet-living, divorced Asian-American math professor at a Midwestern university. Ms. Choi makes him her protagonist, rather than Hendley, the department's young star, or the crazed ex-professor who sent the bomb.

With A Person of Interest, Ms. Choi has written a novel that involves a character similar to Theodore Kaczynski, the real Unabomber. But he is only tangential to the main action. The author did something similar in her previous novel, American Woman, which involved the kidnapping of the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst but was the story of someone else.

Ms. Choi revealed in an interview that her father, a math professor, went to graduate school with the man who became the Unabomber. Her novel invents the possibility they might have once been friends, and goes off from there into fiction. It's no accident that her description of academic life, with its high ambitions, petty jealousies and odd characters feels entirely real. Ms. Choi even makes jokes about it, as when Lee replies to a police officer asking who might have caused the explosion: "Who would want to kill us? We're only professors. We don't do anything."

And there is the description of Susan, "the assistant adjunct professor of computer science," who was "always seemingly dressed to go camping."

After his initial fame as a survivor of the bombing, Lee becomes "a person of interest" to the FBI when odd behaviors and a mysterious letter bring him into suspicion. Hounded by the news media and tailed by police, he becomes stranger still. As his isolation deepens, colleagues shun him, and he longs for his daughter Esther to reappear.

Lee believes the bomber to be Lewis Gaither, a hyper-religious Texan and one-time fellow graduate student whose wife he stole. As difficulties push Lee deeper into self-examination, he takes a final risk. It may seem unlikely that Lee's fellow faculty members would turn against him so thoroughly after his years of working there. But the Wen Ho Lee case, where a veteran scientist was blamed for giving secrets to the Chinese, makes this easier to imagine. And once you accept the possibility, the novel works.

Ms. Choi, who was born in Indiana and grew up in Houston, never reveals what country Lee was from. beyond suggesting that it was one where the Communists invaded. Lee regarded himself as having two youths, one there and one in America. And he would blame what happened in his youth for his insensitivity to those around him.

Looking back at Unabomber events through the experience of the terrorist attack of 9/11, readers may find this novel something of a plea for understanding individuals, whatever their backgrounds.

Anne Morris, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Austin.

Susan Choi

(Viking, $24.95)

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