Flux (Jinwoo Chong)

Flux
Jinwoo Chong
Tantor
Fiction, Literary Fiction/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: 28-year-old Brandon is a marketer at a once-popular fashion magazine... or he was, until a buyout led to his termination, not to mention a breakup with his boyfriend/boss. Strangely, he almost literally falls into a job offer not long after; after surviving a plunge down an elevator shaft at a mall, a man approaches him with an opportunity he can't refuse, a cushy job at a startup touting a new kind of battery and power generator. With blackouts an increasing problem for the country's straining, aging power grid, this company has the potential to remake the entire energy sector, and Brandon's getting in near the ground floor. But there's something very, very odd about this job. He doesn't actually seem to be doing anything, and he has a hard time remembering just what happens in his spacious office between the start of the workday and when he finds himself back home. The more he digs into the question, the more pushback he meets.
It's only four days before Christmas when 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a terrible accident right in front of their school - an accident Bo blames himself for, because she was coming to bring the boys the lunches he forgot to grab on his way out the door. While his kid brother is too young to process it, Bo finds himself stuck between grief and rage and self-hatred, lashing out at his father, his brother, and everyone around him. His only solace is a detective show from the 1980's, once a favorite of his father's and now a favorite of his, too, about hard-nosed detective Thomas Raider investigating the gritty underbelly of Chinatown, but even Raider can't help him escape his misery.
Twenty years ago, Blue was the whistleblower who brought down a massive corporation that turned out to be a scam - one where three people were murdered to cover up the crimes. Now 48 and mute after a stroke, Blue is about to set foot in the defunct headquarters of Flux for the first time since the trial, part of a prime-time news retrospective. But he has his own reasons for returning, ghosts from his past he needs to confront and a plan that, if it works, will finally give him the closure and peace he has sought most of his life.

REVIEW: Yet another random audiobook selection on Libby, Flux takes a literary approach to time travel tropes while also exploring mixed race identity (and how often the non-white side seems to lose out as younger generations seek to be more "American"), the lingering scars of childhood trauma and family dysfunction, and the power of a beloved franchise to give a person strength and grounding during difficult times.
The three threads mostly focus on Brandon, though of course they're all connected in ways that become clear fairly early on - even earlier if you read the blurb and realize this is a time travel story. (Not a spoiler if it's all but spelled out in the blurb...) From the outset, it's clear that Brandon is an unhappy man in many ways, as well as selfish in that way of people who have been emotionally scarred in the past and react by pushing others away (and self-sabotaging). Even before his termination from the magazine, he can see the writing on the wall, not just for his career - magazine readership has been plummeting across the board - but for his relationship with his supervisor. He meets a potential new girlfriend (Brandon is casually bisexual) while impulsively blowing his severance check at the mall... just before stepping into the open elevator shaft, and the plunge that leads to a strange job offer that seems almost too good to be true, sweeping him into a surreal situation where his new boss doesn't seem to demand any actual work, dragging him to parties and meet-and-greets with the company owner, and time seems to be slipping away from him far faster than his memories can account for. Meanwhile, young Bo crumbles after his mother's death unravels his family, leading to lifelong rifts with his brother and his father - neither of whom truly deserve his wrath, yet he can't seem to stop the flow of anger. Blue prepares for his big interview by revisiting an old colleague from the company he helped the feds pull down, the two reminiscing about the past as the aging man sets himself on one last, desperate task that might finally even the books in a life he has come to loathe... or might destroy everything.
The focus in this book is much more on the "literary" side than the "sci-fi" side, slowly building up the characters and layering in the themes and meandering through the invented cop show's arcs and plot lines and stumbling attempts at racial representation (that come across as very stilted, even insulting to most people viewing it in modern times), and even venturing into the lives of the lead actor and his offspring, before finally getting into the time travel aspect. When it does address that concept, the book recognizes the paradoxes involved, how unlikely it is for anyone to actually change the past or break a loop. The ending feels unsatisfactory on some level, shrugging away questions of how or why.
While Flux is, on some levels, an interesting exploration of a broken biracial man who finds himself navigating a nightmarish situation while somehow having fallen into a life he has come to regret and despise, I also found myself frustrated by the plodding pacing, the tendency to wallow in misery and self-created problems, and a resolution that seemed to disregard previously established rules. I can't say I hated it, but I wish it had lived up to its potential a little better.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Fifth Season (N. K. Jemisin) - My Review
Oona Out of Order (Margarita Montimore) - My Review
Interior Chinatown (Charles Yu) - My Review