what the flux?

jinwoo chong's debut novel, the promises of tech, and the grief we owe ourselves

i want you to comb through all the things you can name about the way people of our world consume energy, conserve energy, waste energy, how we are primed to accept the system for what it is and do nothing about it under a complex of fear. And when you’re done with all of that, I want you to forget it, all of it. I want you to listen to me and learn a new word: flux.

jinwoo chong’s flux torments its main cast with questions and truths that they must confront. the type of emotional warfare that they try to hide behind anger and indifference and nostalgia. the narrative divides itself in three characters, but i like to look at them as divisions of time.

in the past, we have 8-year-old bo, who loses his mother in a tragic accident and gradually retreats from his family. in the present, 28-year-old brandon loses his job, falls down an elevator shaft, and is recruited for a silicon-valley-esque tech job where he can’t remember or recognize a damn thing. and in the future, 48-year-old blue participates in a television exposé of flux, a failed bioelectric tech startup whose fraudulent activity eventually claimed the lives of three people and nearly killed him.

this is a novel of promises. a promise of neo-noir and speculative fiction, of elements from a 80s detective show, of the cyclical nature of grief and the pervasive nature of whiteness. these promises are wrapped in a gift of technology: cybernetic implants, tactile solutions for the blackouts that send towns into electrical droughts, time travel. the past and present and future.

brandon spends his narration speaking to you. not you in the sense that he is the speaker and we are the reader, and he is talking to us as a collective. no. he speaks to the fictionalized lead of an equally fictionalized '80s detective show called raider. he speaks to this character like an old friend, with the fondness that childhood affection can give. if you still have enough of it within your heart as an adult, that is.

where bo and blue function within the confines of third person, we are caught between brandon’s first person pov and the intimacy to which he addresses you, you, you. he is not seeking our approval, far from it. there is no distance between you or me or second person. brandon is clinging to the pieces of himself that he hid within raider and his mother.

he only lets himself be perceived by the fictionalized and the dead. that just leaves us with… brandon. this is wholly him. his shortcomings, his failures, his disgust. his obsession, his grief. and it is every bit interesting—mundane in a way that makes me feel bad for him. as if i've written him off as a sad guy who does sad things and give him nothing but a frown in exchange. he's in debt, but i'm indebted to his sadness so look, now we're the same.

words that live forever in this viewer’s mind, synonymous with the certain kind of despair that feels, in the moment, unending.

brandon is no stranger to letting a fictional character influenced his most defining characteristic and personality traits. he has complete loyalty to raider. that character is/was his everything. in the present, raider's actor is found guilty for all kinds of domestic abuse and decades of violence. a tainted reputation, and with that, the ruination of character and support.

brandon is caught between a moral struggle of fiction and reality. he avoids drawing a line between right and wrong, and instead performs nuance in his opinion, growing to hate the actor for what he is doing to character. he even goes on a heated rant that is summed up to separate the art from the artist and film is an art form, we can’t punish everyone that was needed to make the craft. it was the most he ever spoken to another person, i believe.

—CLICK—

chong’s humor definitely shines in these instances. bo’s narration is split evenly between script summaries of episodes from raider and the significance it had on the genre and culture of the time. bo could watch it with his dad but umma hated it for its language and canon typical violence. i know everything to know about this jacket guy.

his catch phrase “give me a reason,” the amount of times he almost dies, the episode his girlfriend actually died, the five-year-old boy he adopts and loses, the final showdown that happens before the show gets canceled. but we’re 70% into the novel and i know nothing about the murders or crime or what leads brandon to become blue. the promises of suspense are instead overshadowed by confusion.

nobody explains anything to brandon, and in turn, nothing is ever explained to us. there’s not even context clues to gauge whether your inferences or guesses are going in the right direction. we’re just one more person falling down an elevator shaft without a hint of what’s going on.

because people, in some primitive and primordial way, need at least one thing in their lives to give meaning to everything they do, and since i had none, not anymore, it would have to be her.

i don't think the science (fiction) matters much. there's more disorientation in what you don't know compared to what you don't understand. i didn’t care for the technological rhyme or reason. the scifi aspects were, in fact, the weakest part of the plot. i was far more engaged by chong’s discussion of family and identity.

of bo losing his mother and thus losing her language, his fraying relationship with his father and brother, straining what he had with his ex wife and daughter. i wish there was more time dedicated to examining the ways grief manifested physically, in the ways brandon looked at himself in the mirror and couldn’t find his mother anymore. in what it means to be asian and american. in the multitudes and complexity of pushing family away, and what you need to confront to put yourself together again.

i wish there was more of umma and appa and kaz and min and jem. the whole (estranged) family dynamic deserved more time to shine. lev, brandon’s boss, had too much page time to speak out of his ass, which i was both parts mad and annoyed about.

this could have been a generational family drama. without all the time travel and tech.

because the best conversations didn’t come from the crimes of a tech startup (a line of murders that are actually never discussed in detail), blue stalking his old employer (it’s more like a game of 21 questions), or bo and brandon obsessing over that damn jacket guy. the most thoughtful thing to come out of flux was the fact that he is— he was— alive.

thank you to netgalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.