Tributaries to the Mainstream
Like Don DeLillo's Libra and E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel, American Woman, by Susan Choi, is a remarkable feat of the historical imagination. A fictional retelling of the notorious 1974 kidnapping of the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst by the revolutionary Symbionese Liberation Army, the novel's focal point is the deepening relationship between Pauline, the Hearst surrogate, and Jenny Shimada, an anti-war radical who is enlisted by organizer Rob Frazier to assist the three surviving cadre members following a police shootout and to encourage them to write a book.
In describing their life underground and on the lam, Choi is largely faithful to the public facts of the Hearst case, while exploring the nexus of race and class, and the intergenerational schisms that radicalize both Jenny and Pauline. With Pauline, Juan and Yvonne, the other members, constitute a kind of dogmatic triad that initially excludes Jenny. Juan exerts his domination over the women, initiates paramilitary exercises, and plans to rob a local merchant to supplement their dwindling funds.
Choi offers an utterly persuasive portrait of their fugitive existence in a remote farmhouse in upstate New York: its stupor and desperation and isolation, the cadre's codes and guises, the fear and paranoia that slowly unhinges, the moral rectitude and righteousness that erodes particularly in Jenny, and the intentions gone tragically awry.
Yet for all that, the author neither affirms nor condemns so much as she shines a clarifying psychological light on her characters: Pauline, at once insulated by privilege and something of a disappointment to her family, is left susceptible to the cadre's indoctrination, while Jenny is indirectly a product of her father's aggrievement over the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.
As critic Sven Birkerts noted, Jenny Shimada is likely the eponymous title character, the "American woman," whose claim to Americanness is at best provisional: Juan considers her of the "Third World," while she insists on her California upbringing; her father takes her to Japan after internment, effecting yet another dislocation; she grows up envying the glamour of the privileged class. If Pauline's story is one of metamorphosis and ultimately reversion, Jenny's marginality, her bitter familial inheritance, her radicalism, and her outlaw anonymity expose the tributaries that bleed off the placid surface of the American mainstream. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, American Woman is a major contemporary novel and highly recommended.
