Susan Choi's Army

Susan Choi to read on 2/10 in NYC

http://www.emergingarts.com/

Tue FEB 10, 7:30pm: CUPCAKE
Yes, "chick lit" is SO over. It's time for dessert!
CUPCAKE is the monthly reading series for New York's
best women writers. SUSAN CHOI and LAURIE SANDELL.
Join us!
Place: Lolita, located on the Lower East Side, 266 Broome St. @ Allen (Subway: F to Delancey).
Door: Free
More info: Please sign up for the mailing list to
stay informed on Emerging Arts’ very own reading
series, featuring New York’s most amazing women
writers. Literary Coordinator Elizabeth Merrick merrick@emergingarts.org

From The Onion

Susan Choi
American Woman
(HarperCollins)
The would-be revolutionaries in American Woman, Susan Choi's elegant re-imagining of the murky aftermath of the Patty Hearst kidnapping saga, are defined by their fractured incompleteness. Jenny, the novel's brilliantly sketched protagonist, is a quietly capable Asian-American activist whose father is hopelessly scarred by his stint in a WWII internment camp. She lives as a fugitive while her mentor/lover rots away in jail, sending furtive messages to her through intermediaries. Kidnappers Juan and Yvonne try to maintain some semblance of order, after a fiery televised altercation with the cops leaves the other members of their revolutionary cadre dead and charred beyond recognition. American Woman's Patty Hearst surrogate, Pauline, struggles to find herself after being forcibly removed from the pampered privilege of her wealthy family and the rigid order of life with her kidnappers-turned-comrades. Meanwhile, the far-left political sphere that unites the novel's lead characters, no longer content to make its voice heard merely through protests, placards, and folk songs, struggles to remain vital following the ostensible end of a war that lent it urgency and purpose. That fractured quality extends to American Woman's narrative. Like film director Robert Bresson, Choi has a way of skipping over the elements most chroniclers would view as their very reason for telling a story. Pauline's kidnapping, a botched robbery that ends in murder, a fatal last stand against police, and even climactic arrests are alluded to in passing, skipped over, or seen as a dim reflection in life's rearview mirror. For the book's first 200 pages or so, nothing much happens. In a simultaneously dramatic and mundane setup, Jenny essentially baby-sits Juan, Yvonne, and Pauline in a rundown New York farmhouse, waiting with varying amounts of patience for the childlike trio to work on a manifesto explaining their actions. They never get far, but that's probably for the best, as it would be hard to find a less qualified spokesman for their cause than Juan, the unchallenged leader of what's left of the group—and also a bullying, sexist, arrogant jerk. After constructing a small but vividly imagined universe out of slow, meticulous detail in its first half, the novel switches to the big picture in its second half, racing forward by leaps and bounds. While some of American Woman's fussy precision gets lost, the book coalesces into an unusually sensitive, resonant coming-of-age story among the unlikely foot soldiers of a revolution that never arrived. —Nathan Rabin

http://www.theonionavclub.com/3949/words.html

From the L.A. Times

--THE BEST BOOKS OF 2003

Best of the best
By Steve Wasserman

December 7 2003
The holiday season is upon us, and from every corner we find ourselves asked to make sense of the avalanche of books that threatens to bury us in tale upon tale. It is, of course, the work of Sisyphus, but we'd have it no other way. More than 100,000 books are annually published in the United States. Here at the Los Angeles Times we have space enough to note and review about 1,500 titles during the year. More nonfiction is published than fiction, and so our reviews follow suit.

Choosing among the universe of the worthy is an inherently fraught process, forcing us to feel much as a World War I surgeon might have felt on the battlefield of Verdun: It's triage every day. Nevertheless, without apology and immodestly, we offer those books that in the opinion of our diverse contributors are among the very best of 2003. We also take this opportunity to single out 20 titles that, in our judgment, are the best of the best.

Fiction

Ten Little Indians
Sherman Alexie
Grove Press

By Night in Chile
A Novel
Roberto Bolaqo
New Directions

Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes, Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
The Ecco Press

American Woman
A Novel
Susan Choi
HarperCollins

The Great Fire
A Novel
Shirley Hazzard
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The Noonday Cemetery And Other Stories
Gustav Herling
New Directions

The Known World
A Novel
Edward P. Jones
Amistad Press

The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens
A Novel
John Rechy
Grove Press

Still Holding
A Novel of Hollywood
Bruce Wagner
Simon & Schuster

Evidence of Things Unseen
A Novel
Marianne Wiggins
Simon & Schuster

Nonfiction

The Youth of Cezanne & Zola
Notoriety at Its Source: Art and Literature in Paris
Wayne Anderson
Editions Fabriart

King of California
J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire
Mark Arax & Rick Wartzman
PublicAffairs

From Chivalry to Terrorism
War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity
Leo Braudy
Alfred A. Knopf

Where I Was From
Joan Didion
Alfred A. Knopf

Goya
Robert Hughes
Alfred A. Knopf

River of Shadows
Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
Rebecca Solnit
Viking

Sea of Glory
America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition,1838-1842
Nathaniel Philbrick
Viking

The Language Police
How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
Diane Ravitch
Alfred A. Knopf

Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West
Perez Zagorin
Princeton University Press

NY Times Notable Books 2003

AMERICAN WOMAN. By Susan Choi. (HarperCollins, $24.95.) A fictional account of the intersection of the radical activist Wendy Yoshimura with the fugitive Patty Hearst, who appeared to have adopted the values and perspectives of the revolutionaries who kidnapped her in 1974. The revolutionary life, it turns out, is mainly squalor and dulled anxiety; time outwears everything, and rapidly too.

A Change in the Weather

By LAURA MILLER

Published: November 30, 2003

In the documentary film ''The Weather Underground,'' Mark Rudd, now teaching at a community college, describes what happens when his students ask him what he did during the Vietnam era: ''I tell them I helped found an organization whose goal was the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and they look at me like I'm from another planet.'' Rudd's past -- which includes leading the 1968 student occupation of Columbia University and several years in the bomb-planting revolutionary cadre called the Weather Underground -- may seem alien to his students, but they keep on looking. A portion of the audience for the film (directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel) and for a rash of recent books about the underground radicals of the 60's and 70's consists of people who were there then. But a generation of writers and artists who are too young to remember, or who can barely remember, the Days of Rage protest, the Weather Underground's bombings of the Capitol and the Pentagon, or the increasingly lethal activities of various splinter groups, also finds the subject alluring.

Everyone feels obliged to take a position on these renegades. Were they noble outlaws; dangerously misguided idealists; spoiled, irresponsible brats; reprehensible terrorists; or drug-addled maniacs? Neil Gordon's novel ''The Company You Keep,'' floats all but the most extreme of these possibilities; the long debates his characters get into over the fine points of Weatherman morality make them sound like refugees from a George Bernard Shaw play. On the one hand, the only deaths resulting from the Weather Underground's love affair with explosives were within their own ranks, three members who accidentally blew up a town house on West 11th Street in 1970. On the other, it took this loss to persuade the group to avoid human targets -- the bomb that destroyed the town house had been intended to inflict casualties.

Gordon (who was 12 when the bomb went off) clearly sympathizes with the militants. What impresses him is their loyalty. None of the real Weather Underground members has ever informed on any of the others, and one of Gordon's characters recalls moving through various counterculture hangouts, obviously recognized, and ''not one person, not a single, solitary person,'' ever told the police a thing.

This is the much-vaunted sense of community that post-60's leftists yearn for. The radicals in ''The Company You Keep'' make enormous sacrifices on one another's behalf. Though the book begins as a former radical's apologia to his daughter, it ends up portraying the underground as a kind of extended family, better in some ways than any group united by mere blood.

For another young writer, Susan Choi, whose novel ''American Woman'' is based on the life of a Japanese-American woman involved in hiding Patty Hearst and some of her Symbionese Liberation Army captors, that camaraderie is illusory. Her heroine, Jenny Shimada, a former Weather-style bomber living in disguise and wretched isolation in upstate New York, agrees to shelter the fugitive kidnappers and their converted victim out of little more than sheer loneliness. She and her former comrades had, she now realized, ''never known quite what they faced'' in believing that the ''rightness'' of their carefully planned violence ''would be obvious, dedicated as it was to saving lives.'' The kidnappers strike her as achingly young, naive, reckless, vainglorious and cruel. Yet she helps them. The ''secretive family dimension'' of their shared radicalism wins out over her reservations about their tactics.

Eventually, the brotherhood of the left lets Jenny down and so does the sisterhood she thinks she's found while fleeing cross-country with the heiress. (The thrillerlike excitement of such flights is surely one reason novelists like to write about the underground.) She attains the kind of belonging that envelopes Gordon's characters only when some fellow Asian-Americans help pay for her legal defense and she's reunited with her father, an embittered former inmate of Manzanar, one of the Japanese-American internment camps.

If Gordon and Choi see the movement as kind of substitute for or imitation of family, Susan Braudy, author of ''Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left,'' thinks the two are indivisible. A Bryn Mawr contemporary of Kathy Boudin (recently paroled after serving over 20 years for her role in a 1981 bank robbery that resulted in three deaths), Braudy was ''excoriated'' by Boudin about the maids who tended the college's dormitories -- and was ''stunned'' when Boudin went to visit her uncle, the illustrious leftist journalist I. F. Stone. From Braudy's perspective, Boudin represented the ''in'' crowd of the left.

In an effort to discredit ''Family Circle,'' Boudin's lawyer has dismissed the book as the work of a ''frustrated and repressed person who has never been able to outgrow her awe of Kathy.'' A cheap, ad hominem dig to be sure, but not entirely off base. The radical circles Braudy describes have the palpitating cliquishness of a classful of 13-year-old girls. ''Jane longed to be accepted by the exclusive Weather group,'' goes a typical sentence. Boudin, in Braudy's opinion, was driven by a more-radical-than-thou competition with her father, a distinguished lawyer, and by contests among her peers to be the most extreme or ''heavy.''

Some might label Braudy's portrait frivolous, but these were mostly teenagers, after all, and as Green and Siegel's somewhat breathless documentary shows, potently stylish and charismatic. You can't really grasp the cultural impact of the Weather Underground without seeing Bernardine Dohrn, its Pied Piper, in action, but you also can't understand it if the cool, sexy image is all you see. Critics like Todd Gitlin, who argues that the Weathermen hijacked a popular movement with a constituency of many thousands and turned it into a marginalized, ineffective coterie of showboaters, can point to the way talk of the group always centers on the morality of its embrace of violence and the personalities of its leaders, rather than the outrages -- the Vietnam War and racial injustice -- that supposedly propelled it. Today's activists, captivated by the romance of the underground radicals of the 60's, might want to keep in mind what Boudin told her parole board in 2001. Asked why someone ostensibly so committed to social work did so little of it while she was free, she replied that being underground ''gave me a certain moral identity.'' When the price paid matters more than what you get for it, it's time to climb back up the rabbit hole and get some fresh air.

They're calling it one of the Best Books of the Year. Who are we to disagree?

American Woman in Publishers Weekly

"Choi gives great, grainy psychological depth and texture to her fictionalized account of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, brilliantly capturing the claustrophobic nature of underground political life in the 1970s."

COMMUNIQUE NO. 4

Greetings to the People:

Comrades, we have more victories to report. "American Woman" received a rave
review on the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air" today. The New York
battalion of Susan Choi's Army can listen to a repeat broadcast tonight
(Monday October 27) on 820 AM. The show begins at 7pm; the review will
probably air at around 7:45. If you are hiding out in a safe house in the
Catskills or somewhere else outside the listening area, you can get an audio
file at http://freshair.npr.org/index.jhtml --click on "current shows" if
it's still Monday; if you get this communiqué later in the week due to
interference by The Man, you will have to click on "archived shows."

Also, Newsday ran a feature about Commander Choi yesterday. It's available
here but remember that you can also find links to many of the Media-Industrial Complex's treatments of this story through susanchoi.info.

¡Venceremos!

Field Marshall Pete
Minister of Information
Susan Choi's Army (SCA)

The lovely & talented Ms. Choi hits Newsday!

http://www.newsday.com/features/books/ny-bktalk3507101oct26,0,972701.story?c
oll=ny-bookreview-headlines