American Woman: A Novel [Hardcover]

Susan Choi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 2003

Susan Choi's first novel, The Foreign Student, was published to remarkable critical acclaim. The New Yorker called it "an auspicious debut," and the Los Angeles Times touted it as "a novel of extraordinary sensibility and transforming strangeness," naming it one of the ten best books of the year. American Woman, this gifted writer's second book, is a novel of even greater scope and dramatic complexity, about a young Japanese-American radical caught in the militant underground of the mid-1970s.

When 25-year-old Jenny Shimada steps out of the Rhinecliff train station in New York's Hudson Valley, the last person she expects to see is Rob Frazer, a shadowy figure from her previous life. On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, Jenny agrees to take on the job of caring for three younger fugitives whom Frazer has spirited out of California. One of them, the granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity. Kidnapped by a homegrown revolutionary group, Pauline shocked America when she embraced her captors' ideology, denouncing family and class to enlist in their radical cell.

American Woman unfolds the story of Jenny and her charges -- Pauline, Juan, and Yvonne, the remains of the busted revolutionary cadre -- as they pursue their destinies from an old farmhouse in upstate New York back to California. Provocative, suspenseful, and often wickedly comic, the novel explores the psychology of the young radicals -- outsiders all -- as isolation and paranoia inevitably undermine their ideals. American Woman is a tour de force with chilling resonance for readers today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Patty Hearst kidnapping was one of the defining incidents of the 1970s, but almost 30 years later, it has faded into legend, despite the many words written on the subject. Choi (The Foreign Student) makes the first stab at fictionalizing the drama, giving it grainy 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. While the unfolding drama-Pauline's transformation, the bank robbery, Pauline and Jenny's cross-country trip-is enthralling, it is Choi's skill at getting inside the heads of her protagonists that gives the novel its particular, unsettling appeal. 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"? Sounding the depths of her conflicted protagonists, Choi takes an uncompromising look at issues of race, class, war and peace.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

Set in 1974, Choi's second novel follows the outlines of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, taking as its heroine one of the minor players in the drama. Jenny Shimada, who once bombed government buildings, has been living underground for two years when the kidnapping occurs. From three thousand miles away in the Hudson Valley, she follows the story obsessively: the cadre's wild demands; the victim's apparent conversion to the cause; the police siege in which most of the group burns to death. What she doesn't suspect is that she will soon be chaperoning the surviving fugitives in a Catskills farmhouse as they attempt to write their memoirs, a money-making scheme cooked up by a former comrade. Jenny's charges prove to be far more than she can handle, and things go comically, horrifically awry. The novel takes a hard-eyed look at American idealism, and yet its imaginative abundance, its fascination with self-invention, and its portrayal of the landscape as a living, breathing presence provide a quintessentially American sense of possibility.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (August 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060542217
• ISBN-13: 978-0060542214
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,353,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When do we know we are doing the right thing?, September 12, 2003

By 

Kali "bengaligirl" (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Woman: A Novel (Hardcover)

As a Brit I have to confess that I wasn't sure I was going to like this book because the title was enough to frighten me away! I mean what do I know about American women? However the blurb intrigued me and I do like books that are "different" and thought provoking so I took the metaphorical bull by the horns and settled down to read it, expecting to read it over a course of several days. All I can say is, "What a gem of a book!" and please can Miss Choi write to my employers and explain to them why I was three hours late to work, it's her fault, I was so engrossed I lost track of time!

I won't lie to you and say that this is an easy book to read, it isn't but it is worth the effort and it is strangely gripping, and even frightening in parts. The protagonist (and heroine) Jenny is suposedly a radical living in a time of political, economical and social upheaval. It is the 1970s and the world is no longer made up patriots and nationalists. Students are demanding change, and European ideas and politics are invading the consciousness of an insulated nation. Jenny herself is the daughter of a Japanese American man who suffered internment in the 1940s and though in the beginning she calls herself a radical, she has serious doubts about the things she has done in the past and what she is about to do. Herself a fugitive from the law, (she helped in a bombing of some Draft Offices) she is called out of hiding to help three young radicals, one of them recently the kidnap victim of the other two. It here we are introduced to Pauline, fragile, confused, and perhaps more dedicated to the cause than her once-upon-a-time captors who treat her with benign contempt mingled with reverence.

Often humourous, sometimes tragic, we are drawn into the shadowy world that Jenny and her friends inhabit. Hiding out in a farmhouse with the three dysfunctional radicals, who sprout Marxism and put themselves through harsh physical training for the war that they are sure that they will have fight in when the time comes, Jenny finds herself questioning her own ideals, along with the lack of compromise on all sides, both within the establishment she despises and the young radicals themselves. Jenny even questions even the passion that drives her charges along with the right way forward in a world built on lies, hypocrisy, racism and social injustice.

As Jenny and Pauline forge a tentative friendship, perhaps built on their mutual similarities and differences, Jenny reminisces about her life, her love affairs and her bittersweet relationship with her proud but deeply cynical father.

Jenny is very much an anti-heroine, both loved and despised in the same breath but she instils sympathy from the reader, where as Pauline is more of a spoilt little rich girl trying to break free from the constraints of her upbringing with only a glimmer of sympathy from the reader because of her emotional fragility.

There are many other interesting characters in the book like Jenny's ex-lover/friend Frazer who brings her out of hiding in the first place, and the other two radicals (once Pauline's captors) who want to change the world in a day but mostly this book is about Jenny, and Pauline with everything else weaving its way around them to bring the story, plot and climax of the novel its final conclusion.

An intellectually stimulating, intriguing and compulsive read is my final word on this novel. "American Women" can be read by readers of any nationality because all of us, young or old can remember a time when we thought the world we lived in could be changed beyond all recognition by the power of our voices, the passion of our beliefs, and the rebellious acts of our bodies, only to shed bitter tears of maturity when we realised that the establishment we sought to defeat wasn't going to fall to its knees and change was a concept of the mind rather than a physical reality.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A stunning book, August 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: American Woman: A Novel (Hardcover)

I thought I knew the Patty Hearst story pretty well, but I was riveted by this novel. It's not just that it's told from the perspective of someone usually considered a minor character in the affair--a young Japanese-American woman who's on the lam for her own reasons--or that the writing is great, though it is. Choi captures a moment in the seventies when politics led some young people to make disastrous, brutal decisions. But the most interesting choices in the book have to do with love and friendships--with how they're formed, and how they're betrayed. Can't wait for the movie.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not great, October 14, 2003

By 

"keikoyamada2" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Woman: A Novel (Hardcover)

I have to agree with the reviewer a while back, who observed that making Shimada a daughter of camp internees who ALSO spent her childhood in Hiroshima and who ALSO later became involved with the S.L.A. is just a little too much. The first fact alone would have been enough. Choi was smart to withhold this information until relatively late in the novel, but even this structural decision can't keep Shimada's psychological trajectory from feeling too tidy.

Otherwise, I think this novel features fine (but not brilliant) psychological insight into the characters, solid plot construction, and most of all, an ambitious exploration of large questions regarding class, race, gender, political and social change, idealism and "American" self-invention. Choi's intelligence is a true pleasure, and this is her greatest strength.

However, the actual writing is a sticking point for me. Sentence by sentence, page by page, chapter by chapter, the novel feels insufficiently compressed, which makes it far too slow. The weak passages water down the strong passages. (If it had been 70-100 pages shorter, the book would be much stronger.) And sorry to say this, but stylistically, I find the writing unmemorable. There are far more gifted stylists in her generation, such as Lahiri, Haslett, Diaz, Ali, etc. But substance is her strength, like I said. I definitely look forward to the next book.