Jinwoo Chong’s Flux is a novel that takes a long long time to come into focus. Knowing that the book deals with time travel from the outset may help a little, but possibly only with the less than coherent middle section.
Flux starts with three seemingly unconnected story lines. In the first, a man is sacked from his job at a popular magazine after a takeover and within a few minutes of that has met a girl, been given a job offer and falls down an elevator shaft. In the second, a young Korean-American boy called Bo is dealing with the death of his mother. And finally, sometime in the future, a man called Blue is trying to get answers from another man called Lev about a company that offered the world boundless free energy but turned out to be a sham. In amongst this is a strange subplot centred around a 1980s police action program and its star. Chong does eventually bring all of these threads together in a time-travel driven but emotional way but he takes what feels like a long time to get there.
Chong plays fast and loose with his time travel premise. The rules of time travel (and there really need to be rules) are never clear. And he doesn’t even bother to explain or even lampshade this failing until close to the very end of the book when one of his characters reflects on the situation:
“Read every book ever written with some hokey plotline [about time travel], they’ll never agree. What you’re dealing with is an exercise of the imagination.”
The closest analogue to Flux is Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, in that Chong is using surreal styling and touchstones of popular culture to try and interrogate and explore the Korean-American experience. But Flux is full of bootstrap paradoxes with hints of predestination and relies too heavily on hand waved time travel mechanics to carry its kind of moebius strip plot. It is a bold experiment, with some interesting components that does not quite land.
Flux by Jinwoo Chong
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