Lee, whose first name is never given, was born in an unspecified Asian country but has been in the United States most of his life. He is in his late sixties, nearing the end of a rather mundane career in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at an undistinguished university in a small town in the Midwest. He lives alone, and he is in general distanced from the community and the college. Not ready to retire from teaching because he has nothing else to do, he foresees none of the upheavals that will change his set routines and force him to reevaluate his entire life history.
As Susan Choi’s novel A Person of Interest opens, Lee is realizing that he had never liked the bomb victim, his colleague Professor Hendley, and that much of that dislike was because, unlike himself, Hendley was young and popular with students. Their offices were next to each other, and Lee jealously noticed that students seldom came to see him, but there were often lines of students eager to talk with Hendley. Both professors, however, are alone in their offices when Hendley opens a small packet he has received through campus mail and it explodes in his face. Lee is knocked over by the blast, and it is a student who first sees Hendley and calls for help. Hendley is taken to intensive care at the local hospital, where he dies a few days later.
No culprit is immediately identified, and rumors abound. Lee is startled when it begins to appear that he is being singled out for more than routine questioning by the FBI agents who are pursuing the case. Lee does not attend the campuswide memorial ceremony for Hendley, and his absence is noticed. Soon, all the office staff, so important in every department, are avoiding him, and faculty and students in groups suddenly stop talking when he appears. Attendance in his classes dwindles. Although Lee has had tenure for more than twenty years, the chair of the department informs him that another faculty member will take over his classes for the remainder of the spring semester and will teach his summer class. Things become even worse when the FBI refers to him as “a person of interest,” not necessarily a suspect but someone who has information about the case. Agent Jim Morrison believes Lee knows a lot more about the case than he has told them.
Television and newspaper media pick up on this aspect, and Lee’s name is always mentioned in conjunction with the fatal explosion. When major newspapers and journals across the country publish an anonymous manifesto by someone, now referred to as the Brain Bomber, who says that all the brightest scientists should be killed before they create more harm in the world (there would have been no atom bomb without an Albert Einstein, for example), Lee finds himself not just ostracized but constantly plagued by the media and the FBI agents. He is forced to take a polygraph test, which first seems to exonerate him but then is discarded because statistics suggest that the “lie detector” is not reliable when administered to people from certain groups, including Asians.
Complicating things for Lee and for the investigating agents is that immediately after the fatal bombing, Lee receives a long, unsigned letter, although Lee knows its source. The letter is from a disliked acquaintance from his past, Lewis Gaither, who says he has read about the bombing and wants to know if Lee is safe. Lee knows there is more to it than apparent concern; it is a taunting and an unwelcome reminder of long-ago events.
In an extended flashback, the reader learns that decades earlier Lee had been in graduate school with Gaither, and what started as a tentative friendship between them had ended badly. Gaither, less capable at math than Lee, was an ardent fundamentalist Christian who always wanted to convert people. He had insisted Lee accompany him and his wife to an evangelical gathering, but the result was unexpected. When Lee met Aileen, he learned she was equally antithetical to Gaither’s religious fervor, and they soon began a secretive affair. When Lee learned that Aileen was pregnant with Gaither’s child, he ended their relationahip. Aileen, however, had no wish to stay with Gaither, and soon she left him and wrote to Lee. They married, but Gaither insisted on having the baby boy, John, and tricked Aileen into signing a document that gave him full custody. Lee now remembers with shame that he was glad not to have Gaither’s baby around, and, although he and Aileen eventually had a baby girl, Esther, he knows Aileen had wanted her son, too. Lee blames Gaither for the unhappiness of his marriage, though he eventually recognizes it was in large part because of Lee’s resentment at having a wife who had been Gaither’s. Aileen died when their daughter Esther was fourteen. Lee thinks his second marriage, to
Michiko, a Japanese woman who, it turned out, primarily wanted a way to become an American citizen, was also tainted by his distrust in the idea of closeness as manifested in his relationship with Aileen.
Lee is guilt-ridden and angry at the letter from Lewis. He writes back, but his letter is returned, addressee unknown. The FBI agents, who have been checking all campus mail, ask Lee about the letter, and Lee lies and says he has thrown it away. The agents search his house. Jim Morrison becomes increasingly interested in what Lee might be hiding. Lee is certain now that Gaither is the bomber, and he tells this to Morrison. A few days later, Morrison claims that Gaither is dead, so Lee must still be withholding information.
Lee becomes increasingly disoriented, stressed, and insomniac as the FBI pursues him. He has no friends, and the only lawyer he knows is his divorce lawyer, who tells Lee this case is beyond his expertise. Lee would like to believe his daughter Esther would be among those who read about his situation and somehow come to rescue him, but for many years he has not even known her whereabouts. Frank Fanso, a former colleague who had left for a more prestigious university, does read about him and phones Lee, but there is little Frank can suggest to solve the case and thus remove Lee as a suspect.
Often operating only at the level of hallucination and panic, Lee knows he is the one who needs to find the Brain Bomber, but he has no idea how to do so. Another mail delivery brings further complications. Lee receives a brown envelope that contains a page from his dissertation—a page, not a duplicated copy. He surreptitiously sneaks into the university library to the section that contains one of only three copies of his dissertation, and he finds that indeed the page has been cut from his work. Why is Gaither or, if he is dead, someone else determined to stalk and frame him so thoroughly?
What the novel does brilliantly is to take the reader into the increasingly tortured mind of a fairly ordinary man when he is faced with the perilous unknown. At one point, Lee is hiding in his bedroom. From his bed, he looks in the mirror on the dresser, seeing the reflected images of part of the windows and beyond to the crowd of neighbors outside who are gathered to watch with glee the FBI agents and television reporters coming to the house of someone they do not know but are ready to consider guilty. What mathematician Lee sees in the mirror is, he thinks, “the simplest geometry, the angles of incidence and reflection,” but clearly it is also symbolic of his entire situation at this point. The unexpected incidents that have occurred have forced him to reflect on what led to his being in his present miserable situation. Only by exhaustive examination of his past and of the kind of person he really is (apart from the idea of himself that he has created) does he have a chance to do anything to ameliorate the current predicament.
In addition to Lee’s intense self-examination, which leads him to revise his view of himself and others when secrets he has buried even from himself are unexpectedly uncovered, another theme that resonates throughout the novel is the ease with which outsiders can garner information about anyone. The Brain Bomber clearly has access to intimate knowledge of Lee and his career as well as his current address and situation. The media, insatiable in the quest for sensational copy related to the case, are careless of truth in what they print and report. The FBI has no qualms about searching Lee’s house, tailing him (sometimes as many as six cars follow him around), tapping his telephone, or intercepting his mail. His garbage containers are suddenly emptied on a day when the sanitation department is not due. He does not have a cell phone, but if he did his every location could be easily traced, and similarly if he used a computer his e-mail and all Internet activity could be tracked. Fingerprints on letters become an issue, and if there were DNA evidence that, too, would be under scrutiny. Even more glaring, concerning human rights, is the fact that Lee is essentially used as bait in the effort to capture the killer.
Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student (1998), won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second, American Woman (2003), loosely based on the life of Patty Hearst, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. A Person of Interest has been widely reviewed and critically acclaimed and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Increasingly, her fiction is particularly noted for its literary style and for her often poetic use of language. In A Person of Interest, Choi repeatedly demonstrates that she knows how to use language to build tension and suspense, although the whodunit detective fiction aspect of the novel is less in the foreground than her creation of the main character, Lee, and her in-depth portrayal of his mental state as the plot unfolds.