[In the following review, Dickinson comments on Choi's handling of the formal and thematic elements of The Foreign Student.]

The Korean War (1950–53) is sometimes called America's forgotten war. It took M∗A∗S∗H to bring the 38th Parallel out from the shadows of Allied victory in WWII and the debacle of Vietnam. What must not be forgotten, of course, is that 54,000 Americans gave their lives in Korea, a sacrifice equaling that of the more-publicized and controversial Vietnam War.

Against this Fifties backdrop. Susan Choi sets her first novel, The Foreign Student. Chang Ahn loses his comfortable youth as a professor's son in 1950 when war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula. Family and friends separate and scatter. In a deft interplay between the story of Chang's student year abroad and the back-story of his wartime survival, the novel ends where it also began. Chang is ready to fly to the U.S. and begin the story we have finished.

At University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, Chang (his first name now Americanized to "Chuck") arrives a month before classes start. He has time to be mostly alone and explore and knows "a deserted university in August can feel like paradise." Unfortunately, the scene that would plunge Chuck into the mix of his fellow classmates (a pre-classes kegger, for example) never materializes. As dreamy contemplation of mountains near Sewanee threatens to overtake a paucity of interactions with others, we are left with hothouse drama.

Consider that when Chuck stays over at Christmas break, his dorm mother arranges for him to eat with the cooking stall, several Negro bachelors. We would like to sec Chuck react to this talkative group, but Ms. Choi does not deliver those scenes. Instead, Chuck retreats to the dorm mother's room, ostensibly for monkish study, and raids her food.

With Christmas break over, Chuck goes from roommate's return to summer job (and, not unexpectedly, solitary duties) in Chicago in the space of a few pages. With this jump cut, college spring semester was never easier. We accept a foreign student might be a loner. But isolation that elides a student body, a faculty (one professor does not a teaching staff make), and a semester to boot? Still, one is too lonely a number to sustain a novel and Chuck meets a woman, his age, who lives off-campus.

Katherine is pure enigma, Sewanee's minister without portfolio, it seems, and also like Chuck, a loner. Another character in the slim cast is Charles Addison, professor of literature (a not surprising occupation at the home of the redoubtable Sewanee Review). As we learn through revelatory dropped petals, Charles and Katherine have a relationship, a fact that Chuck and Katherine warily circle.

Yes, The Foreign Student falls short with hothouse drama and some doling of details about Chuck (on page 238, we learn for the first time he regularly smokes cigarettes). Despite those flaws, the character of Katherine redeems the novel. Impossible, or nearly impossible, love is one of the great themes of literature and Ms. Choi dives in with this novel. We learn about Katherine in a sequence of well-paced revelations and developments. More than once, Ms. Choi takes far-fetched premises and ingredients for what might be simple co-dependence melodrama and fashions outcomes that resemble observed life. What Ms. Choi has, as a writer of fiction, is a strong understanding of issues of the heart, especially as they pertain to women.

Often, published first novels are more about talent and promise, less about command and inspiration. This is true of The Foreign Student. The story line, at times, seems to run thin. As if it were performed by a few disparate musical instruments, not a complete ensemble. Nonetheless, the line is shapely and pleasing and pulls us along to its narrative coda. Ms. Choi's sensitivity to emotional electricity will take her fiction places. I plan to read her next novel too.