It's not clear if the title character in Susan Choi's A Person of Interest has the first name or last name of Lee, as that's his only moniker throughout the novel. This lack of a full name emphasizes Lee's academic stature as one of the "shorter poppies." The taller poppies, or those with a more flamboyant presence in the world of mathematics, are being lopped off by a mail bomber. The latest victim is Rick Hendley, a popular Computer Science professor whose office is next door to Lee's. Lee has mixed emotions about Hendley's demise, as he has always envied the constant stream of traffic to Hendley's office. Still, despite the depiction of Lee as a nondescript tenured professor at a nondescript Midwestern college, Lee has had a pretty interesting life. He emigrated from Japan as a young man and later stole the wife (Aileen) of a grad school friend (Lewis Gaither). When Lee receives an anonymous letter that attracts the attention of the FBI, suddenly he is a persona non grata with his colleagues and his neighbors. What's so fascinating here is that Lee and I drew completely different conclusions about who sent the letter, and I think it was Choi's intention to show that Lee's long-harbored guilt interferes with his ability to be objective about both the letter's contents and its authorship. The plot becomes Kafkaesque as Lee's life unravels at the hands of the media and the rumor mill, and it drags a little while catching us up on Aileen's son with Lewis. Born John, now known as Mark, he's totally unaware that the woman who raised him is not his biological mother. The book is ultimately a story of redemption as Lee tries to compensate for the dreadful mistakes of his past and finally appreciates the richness of his own life.
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