Flux supplies an endless stream of references to existing novels, movies, pop-cultural figures, and tropes: Blade Runner, Woody Allen, Elizabeth Holmes. Flux, as in Back to the Future’s flux capacitor. Chong doesn’t hide these influences. In an interview with The Millions, he admits to reading John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start Up and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown while writing his novel—inspirations behind the Elizabeth Holmes figure and the detective show trope, respectively.
Even the section titles echo existing speculative books and shows. Part one is “Severance,” as in Ling Ma’s novel Severance and the unrelated television show Severance, which both, like this novel, skewer the tech industry. Chong’s Severance is also literal: the payout Brandon receives when he’s fired, and his abrupt departure from the present timeline.
The second section’s title, “Signing,” likewise has dual meanings: a new job contract and American sign language. Brandon arrives at Flux, recruited by Lev, who brings to mind Silicon Valley’s Russ Hanneman. This character is not to be trusted. He’s playing a part, luring Brandon into Flux’s world: “You’ve been so patient,” Lev said, “all this time, wondering. Exciting, right? Makes you fucking horny, doesn’t it?” In Flux, even one-percent milk has a second meaning.
Along the way, these moments of doubling are clues for both Brandon and the reader to realize that Flux isn’t at all what it seems. When Brandon, at last, understands he’s not living in the normal 24-hour, seven-days-a-week timeline, when he realizes there are major gaps in his memory and worrisome misunderstandings, the book clicks into place. I was rapt, watching his confusion turn to clarity.
Flux holds up a fun house mirror to our contemporary world—a too-busy time of reading headlines and pretending to know the full story, when everything we say is also a reference to something else. Daily life is disorienting, especially online and when following the news cycle. Perhaps that is Chong’s point: as we emerge from our era of collective panic, of sickbeds and funerals, home offices and odd hobbies, we find a world that looks like the before-times, but something’s off. Our shoulders stay high with anxiety, unable to trust what we think is safe. Understanding the psychological effects of our ongoing pandemic, racist violence, and school shootings will only come with time—or a time machine. It’s fitting, then, that Chong uses his time machine to look backward and forward, to find both meaning and justice, while subverting Raider’s revenge plot that Brandon so admires.
Late in the second section of the book, Chong shows the time-traveling narrator return to his child-self at Christmas. It’s days after his mother’s death—or, perhaps, weeks; time remains hazy. Raider, as always, plays on TV. Scenes of the grieving family are interspersed with TV clips to poignant effect. Rendered through adult-as-child’s eyes, this father’s attempts at celebration are especially powerful. Brandon, at last, can see that his father tried to shield him and his younger brother from pain:
He held the Gameboy in his hands. It was the color he wanted. Hal had even wrapped a value pack of batteries. There were no notes, he saw. He wondered how long it had taken Hal to unstick them all from the wrapping paper without ripping them. How many of them said things like Love, Umma and Appa, or other things his father didn’t want him thinking about anymore? His mother could make things so warm, and it only appeared to him now just how different the tree looked, the light coming through the windows, even the sound of their voices. He closed his eyes. He wanted to do what his father had asked.
Toward the end of the novel, Chong writes a fine description of living out of time, and with old pain: “It’s tough living this way, in a jar of my thoughts. I can’t imagine doing this forever. The choices are: go back to the dark, or go forward, and I am still not sure which way I have decided to go.” Move forward, Chong argues, toward love and justice—even if saving a loved one is a paradox.