Drifting Across America

American Woman 

by Susan Choi

"And always the radio on, somehow underscoring her loneliness more than relieving it. She had plenty of distance from Dolly but still, late at night, she would turn down the radio low. In the vast nighttime hush she could play it quite softly and hear. The contrast of her life with the world outside sometimes felt too great on these nights. The radio was like a tiny porthole in her drifting balloon."(p 89) - American Woman, Susan Choi.



Susan Choi's novel is based on the real events surrounding the kidnapping of Patty Hearst in the 1970's.  She imbues her narrative with psychological depth and texture, while cleaving close to the true course of events. Instead of focusing on Patty (here named Pauline, the daughter of a wealthy newspaper publisher), Choi turns her attention on Jenny Shimada, a young Japanese-American woman, who, fleeing the Feds after she and her boyfriend orchestrate the bombing of draft offices to protest the Vietnam War, agrees to help Pauline and her kidnappers. This protagonist is based on a real-life person, Wendy Yoshimura, who spent what's now called "the lost year" (1974, when Patty and her captors disappeared) with Patty and two of her kidnappers. In Choi's book, the four spend the time in a rented farmhouse in New York State, with Jenny running errands while Pauline and her "comrades" undergo physical training for their fight against "the pigs" and halfheartedly write a book (purportedly to eventually raise money to pay for their lifestyle).

While the author deftly handles Pauline's transformation, the bank robbery, Pauline and Jenny's cross-country trip, this was only part of the story.  More important for this reader was the more successful aspect of the novel -- the author's ability to create the atmosphere of suspense for the radicals who have segregated themselves from everyday life as most of us know it. This helps one understand the boredom and slowness of the action as the group is "lying low" out of reluctance to risk being recognized. The slowness ends in dramatic fashion in the final section of the novel with the denouement of the story. Even though you may know the basic history of the underlying events the author is able to maintain your interest.

Another important aspect is Choi's skill at getting inside the heads of her protagonists adding to the particular, unsettling appeal of the novel. What makes Jenny a radical? And what then leads her to wonder whether "perhaps they had been wrong to fight Power on its terms, instead of rejecting its terms utterly"? She presents protagonists that are often conflicted and, in doing so, Choi takes an uncompromising look at issues of race, class, war and peace. That having been said, I found the style of the author limited the effectiveness of her storytelling. This novel reminded me of Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey , a novel that succeeded both in creating an unsettling narrative (loosely based on real-life communist sympathizers in the 1940's) and demonstrating a felicitous prose style. The comparison may seem unfair but having experienced Trilling's prose I could only be disappointed by that of Susan Choi. Nevertheless this novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

American Woman by Susan Choi. Harper Perennial, 2004 (2003).