Susan Choi's Army

Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe

BOOK REVIEW American Woman By Susan Choi

THAT '70S SHOW WITH WIT AND EMPATHY, SUSAN CHOI'S AMERICAN WOMAN
TUNES IN TO THE DECADE'S POLITICAL AND MORAL STRUGGLES
By Elinor Lipman

Converting history into fiction is a tricky business, inviting current-events
devotees to question not only the facts, but the author's right to fiddle
with the well-chronicled past.

Susan Choi's second novel, "American Woman," inspired by the 1974 kidnapping
and seeming conversion of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army,
deserves a medal not yet minted for best use of history as a literary
lubricant. Choi, who was acclaimed for her 1998 debut novel, "The Foreign
Student," has written a story that echoes the headlines of 1974-75 so
compellingly and believably that it is surely gospel enough for any devoted
archivist.

While Patricia Campbell Hearst is not a character in "American Woman,"
her fictional counterpart, Pauline, is a daughter of San Francisco's most
prominent family who is kidnapped at gunpoint from her Berkeley apartment,
who adopts the causes of a revolutionary cadre, was seen in a video of a
bank robbery, and who did not die in the spectacular shootout and fire -
covered live on TV - that killed her comrades.

The book's protagonist is Jenny Shimada, a Japanese-American on the lam after
helping her boyfriend bomb government targets, "mostly draft offices, always
deep in the night when no one would be killed. . . . They'd known nothing
better seized attention than violence, and that the rightness of theirs
would be obvious, dedicated as it was to saving lives." William the
boyfriend goes to jail; Jenny, at age 25, is living pseudonymously, looking
nervously over her shoulder in Rhinecliff, N.Y., two hours up the Hudson
from Manhattan. She is recruited by Rob Frazer, whose "anti-intellectual
ass-kicking hard-left persona" and radical rsum are neatly abridged thusly:
"And then, all of a sudden and almost too fast, had come Mexico City's
raised fists and the threat of the boycott, his loud support, a pipe bomb
through his window, a national news crew the same afternoon, and,
crowningly, a denunciation from a Republican senator and former football
star who called him, Frazer, a sour-grapes football failure turned Commie
destroyer of the American way. Which meant, just like that, fame."

Such narrative summaries succeed for their economy and drollness. Choi's eye
for the pretentious, the overly earnest, the self-anointed morally superior
is flawless. Here is a novel that gives us permission to revel in types -
from the benign to the murderously idealistic. She gives a Riverdale couple,
who agree to harbor Jenny so they won't seem square, a subscription to the
Evergreen Review and tickets to avant-garde theater. One of the
revolutionaries' "contiguous circle" is remembered "at big parties, usually
piously listening to somebody play the guitar."

Frazer asks Jenny to oversee if not baby-sit three fugitives from the cadre,
including the famous heiress, smuggled from the West Coast to the East,
heading for a safe haven in a New York farmhouse. Frazer, the self-appointed
above-ground uncompromised ally, tells Jenny that she will be the helper and
go-between below ground "to take care of the everyday things. The grocery
shopping. The phone calls." All Frazer asks in return for a safe haven is
that the fugitives tell all in a book. He introduces the idea to the
unofficial spokesman for the three survivors, Juan, a fabulously skittish
hothead and spouter of rhetoric. " 'I don't know,' " Juan says. " 'A book
seems so, I don't know.'

" 'Bourgeois,' " his wife supplies.

" 'But it's another way of waging war. A war of words. And it would help you
make money,' " Frazer says.

" 'I prefer manifestos. I mean, Mao wrote a book. Definitely. It just seems
like, in this country books are such shit.' "

Choi does a perfect job of presenting Juan's "idiot temper," his
"disproportionate swagger . . . his preening self-importance." The reader
never doubts Choi's authority; there is not a false or planted note in the
characters' dialogue or meditations. She inserts a subtle layer of cynicism
between readers and the characters' raised fists, yet one has great faith in
her authorial neutrality. We know that Jenny is misguided and Pauline is
brainwashed, but we hear them out with our full and fascinated attention.
It takes more than research to nail an exchange of dialogue that is all at
once chilling, believable, and darkly comic. "This is a twelve-gauge
pump-action shotgun - modified, obviously," the former debutante tells
Frazer impassively upon their first meeting. When he breaks the news that
the fugitives can't travel cross-country with guns, but that he'll replace
them once they've reached their destination, she says with her
Stockholm-syndrome-induced expertise, "I'd rather have a fully automatic."
Choi manages something quite remarkable: Her characters' revolutionary
prattle emerges as authentic and deeply felt; at the same time the reader
recognizes it as the clichd and idealistic rants that ever so subtly mock a
movement that - to cite more recent headlines - shrank a real-life bank
robber and trigger woman down to a soccer mom in St. Paul 30 years later.
Jenny, based on Hearst's real-life roommate/co-fugitive Wendy Yoshimura, is
one generation removed from Japanese internment, "enraged by the state of
the world, but perhaps even more she'd been enraged by herself, such a
ridiculous, small, not-taken-seriously, average American girl." "But it
wasn't intentions, however lofty or petty, that mattered, but how things
turned out. When she shined that harsh light onto all of her acts, her
bombings no longer seemed so exalted."

"American Woman" first and foremost examines a young radical's eroding moral
certainty. But it also mines the tragicomic elements inherent in good
intentions gone murderously awry. Its great achievement is the tale of the
shrill, the obnoxious, the armed and dangerous told in a wondrously
beautiful voice.