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I’ve been enjoying the recent boom of meta Hollywood and film industry takes. The Studio, the Interior Chinatown adaptation, and most recently, Wonder Man have kept me entertained with their behind-the-scenes vibes. Maybe that’s why today’s recommendation came to mind out of the blue. Here is a trippy time travel story following a queer, biracial (white and Korean American) man. Noir detective scenes from a fictional ’80s television crime series cut into the story of a kid who lost his mom, a young man who lost his job in media, and an older man working on an exposé of a villainous tech startup. This book reads like a collage of different times, characters, and mediums corroborating on a journey that feels as disorienting as time travel might. The timelines and television moments blur into each other before coalescing into a story that is, at its heart, about unprocessed grief and biracial and Asian American identity.
Flux by Jinwoo Chong
Flux is written as a tell-all, with the narrator speaking to the main character in a fictional detective show. Through this device, the story retains the television series’ gritty, noir lens. We meet Brandon, who was just laid off from his job at a magazine and who’s decided to ghost his pseudo-relationship. A near-fatal accident leaving work leads him to a stranger who witnessed the incident and offers him an unusual job opportunity.
Brandon’s connection to a mysterious company with a celebrity head honcho takes him to strange places and leads to inexplicable time hiccups. He begins an investigation into his own spiraling life and sees a different kind of opportunity in the dangerous position in which he finds himself. Brandon’s storyline is interrupted by scenes from the life of Bo, a kid who lost his mom and whose relationship with his dad is crumbling in the aftermath, of Blue, a mysterious and lonely man involved in exposing a startup, and from the detective series, which explores Asian American representation and stereotyping onscreen as well as its star’s abuse scandal.
There’s a lot going on here: exploration of identity as an Asian American and what loss of one side of your identity might look like as a biracial person, the expansive and lasting reach of unprocessed grief and trauma, and representation in media and the cult of celebrity. It wasn’t Brandon, a specter of grief whose pain has made him toxic and hard to like, that made this read for me, but rather the act of exploring formidable questions about life’s great tragedies, and of working out the puzzle that is this story. If you enjoyed 12 Monkeys, the’90s Terry Gilliam time travel film starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, check this one out.
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