Customer Reviews

Trance: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Trance is a vividly imagined, brilliantly written, darkly intelligent, and devastatingly satirical examination of the dissipation of 60's values and the commencement of the Me-First era of the 70's that carries forward until the present day. An epic book, Trance carries very little fat on its frame. Each sentence is packed with an unforgettably vivid image, each page shimmers with revelation. Despite what the Washington Post review reprinted here says, I found the numerous characters to be explored with depth, complexity, and occasionally surprising empathy.

Despite its length, Trance is a page-turner, too, with edge-of-the-seat scenes of suspense and the compelling detail of a police procedural. And yet this is a highly adventurous work of art as well, with its surprises (shifts in tense and point of view, highly cinematic renderings of certain scenes, entertainingly digressive set-pieces, intertextual and popcultural references, subtle typographic play) integrated into the text so expertly one hardly notices the "experimental."

At the end, the reader realizes that the story of "Patty Hearst" (Alice Galton, in this version) is a mere pretext on which Sorrentino drapes this narrative coat of many colors, a device through which he depicts and satirizes the seismic disturbances upsetting American culture during the 70's, the bankruptcy of cheap revolutionary rhetoric, the meaning and depth of identity itself.

Trance is a masterpiece, powerful and exuberant and beautiful.

Calling this a book about the Patty Hearst kidnapping is like calling Moby Dick a book about life aboard a whaling ship or Gravity's Rainbow a book about rocket science. Is Trance in a league with these masterpieces? Not quite, but it is the best novel I've read this year.

The book opens with "Tania", freshly converted to the Symbionese cause, firing upon a L.A. sporting goods owner who is trying to corral her two comrades for a petty shoplifting incident. This shooting tragically leads to the deaths of the other members of the Symbionese Liberation Army in a fire fight with police and Tania and the other two survivors go underground in what is now known as "The Missing Year". As people who saw the documentary "Guerilla" know, the missing year is a big hole in the known record. Sorrentino fills that gap with creative enthusiasm and style.

Trance contains a number of scenes that make it a slightly surreal, weirdly funny, cinematic, and always gripping read, as well as being extremely intelligent and perceptive. There's an incredible shoot-out sequence in the first chapter after a long and suspenseful build up. There's an autopsy scene that brings home the reality of the death these young radicals always spoke of so easily. There are the thoughts of Tania's mother and father as they puzzle over their daughter's betrayal of them and their class. There is an exploration of how radical ideas could infect some very normal young kids from middle class backgrounds. There is a well-paced and interesting look at the methodical efforts of the FBI in finding Tania and the rest of the SLA. On this level the book is satisfying in a very straightforward way.

But there is also a very funny (and dirty) letter from a pet owner to Penthouse Forum, and anagrams, a hilarious scene where one character has a psychic divulge to him the unseen ingredients of the fast food he's been eating, two unusually knowledgable FBI agents playing a game of Boticelli during a stakeout, a scathing standup comedy routine at the old Grossingers hotel which degenerates into an absurdist riff on the Nixon presidency, a teenage boy who guiltily abuses himself to thoughts of Flip Wilson's transvestite alter-ego, Geraldine, unhinged encounters with Sara Jane Moore (who tried to kill Jerry Ford and was also involved with the SLA). In always trying something new, Trance is mapping imaginative terrain as much as it is historical.

This is a perfect book for the fans of writers like Don Delillo, Philip Roth, Jonathan Lethem, or David Foster Wallace.

I was excited to pick up a fictionalized account of Patty Hearst and her time with the SLA. I didn't live through that time period, and I have only a fringe knowledge of the events, but what a gripping premise, right?

Wrong. I think this book is only a winner for SLA/Hearst-ophiles who can put the story in a larger context. It does not stand on its own at all. It is told from way too many points of view, and it takes tremendous concentration in the beginning of the book to remember all these characters and figure out why each one of them is narrating. I got bogged down in the switching-around and wanted the action to get started.

Other reviewers have talked about the beautifully developed characters and scenes. I had the opposite reaction to the long inner dialogues and descriptive passages--I wanted Sorrentino to get along with the action already.

Trance - a novel that talks fact with a fiction and lot of imagination in itself. Each page in itself is filled with reading ecstasy and involves reader into it.

Trance is story about kidnapping and is narrated with perfection.

Say, like me, you're an oncologist with a thriving practice and a loving husband. Still, there's something missing from your life. It's called art. That's what's missing from your life. The art of literary art. Tragedy, comedy, pathos, bathos, the whole shebang. Okay, I took a lit gut at Rutgers and I may not know exactly what I'm talking about, but I do know this: art transcends. I can cut a man open and remove his pancreas, but I have no clue what he's thinking. Sorrentino does. He knows what people are thinking, and with his powerful writing he slings us (the reader, the doctor) over his shoulder and together we scale the ladder of storytelling glory. To call this a book about Patty Hearst is to call Crime and Punishment a book about crime, or punishment. 'Nuff said. Read, weep. Change your life. Find a lump. Call me.

I actually considered purchasing this until I read what appear to a number of literary-hip wannabe reviews presumably written by the author or his friends. The reviews certainly have the tell-tale signs of similar self-promotions that one finds increasingly often in Amazon reviews.

This book is well named, because it put me in a trance reading it.
How it does go on. I like to read before going to sleep and this book actually made me dread going up to bed. I'm old enough to remember when everyone was wondering what had happened to Patty Hearst, and I can't say I've learned much new, except that this story is more tragic than I had thought Thank God those days are over, and we've moved on to some other politically fraught era.
For good reading, I've enjoyed most of the other reviews of this book more than the book itself.

After getting almost halfway through this book, I'm calling it quits. As someone who did not live through the bizarre historical events, I thought the premise of the book had promise. The potential of this premise is lost in a hodgepodge of overdeveloped characters. The story is told from multiple points of view, and each character is granted ridiculous and unrealistic levels of introspection. During each segment of internal dialogue, of which there are a billion, I kept thinking, "Noone thinks this much, and even if they did, just tell the freakin story!" Minutae rules the day in this book, and I kept at it in the hopes that a story would jump up and pull me in. It hasn't. Next thing I know, I've blown significant amounts of free time reading about blindfold types, and other such trivialities. Anyway, I can't recommend this, sorry.

Nobody told me when I ordered this that it would require a tripod or other balancing device. I'd been advised it was a stand-alone book. I was excited to get the book, at first. Ordinarily, I don't read novels that take place before, or after, my lifetime; with few exceptions I avoid those books of whose subjects I have little knowledge. But I was just knocked out by the idea.

Totally guess what. The only people who might like this book are those who already know all about it. In fact, I'd say that in order to enjoy the book you have to have read it first, which I think may be a physical impossibility but I'll have to look it up in a stand-alone encyclopedia. Mine has pictures.

Here are my major objections to the book: (1) there are many, many characters, and the book tells the story from their points of view. What you have to do, as a reader, is pay attention, *starting from the very beginning!!* in order to tell who's who. I don't know about you, but I like a book where you don't have to pay attention.

Furthermore, while all this character's-point-of-view stuff was going on, how much action was happening? ZERO. ZERO ACTION. OK, so there's a gun battle on the first page, followed quickly by two carjackings, a kidnapping, a police assault, another kidnapping, and a fatal conflagration involving firearms and incendiary grenades. It takes all the way to page 91 to get to this point. GET ON WITH THE ACTION ALREADY!

Other reviewers have talked about the beautifully developed characters and scenes. I had the opposite reaction to the long inner dialogues and descriptive passages. Who wants developed characters and scenes? With my fringe knowledge and lack of a tripod to hold up this definitely not-stand-alone-type-book-object, I just wanted action. People who don't know anything about Patty Hearst know that's what the story's supposed to be about. People who don't know anything about novels know that's what novels are all about. That's why the New York Times has decided Elmore Leonard's a great writer. I'm sticking with him.

We have here many robust debates concerrning the literrary quality of this boook. How abouten we do some of the talk about the boook's subject, the Miss Hearst of the criminal backgrround and saucy bang-bang? She is the perrson of light and fame, she is the face of a generration of disrrepute. And what does she has to say about Mr. Sorentino's baldface depiction of herr exploits? Is she herrself interrested or is she declining to comment? Is a lawsuit in the offering or is it perhaps waiting tucked in herr fashionable sleeve like the switchblade of Laurrence Olivetti's war criminal in William Goldman's excellent novel of the same name, WARR CRIMINAL, which became a majorr motion picture staring Dustbin Hospital? I would like to know what she is thinking, if thinking is a process of which she is capable. Does she want to comment? Would she like to meet with Sorentino for a conferrence in which she corrects the copious errrors of which the boook is guilty? Or perhaps to mime some of the activites for which she has become famous? Bang, bang? You know? This is difficult because in my country we have a saying, it goes, "if you are Patricia Hearrst then perhaps you'd like to have it both ways." It seems that this boook failed to countinince these possibilities. I'd like to give him a chance to do so but who knows when such an authorr is going to turrn on you. They are difficult beings, yes. Best to put them away until such time as they are so desirring nutrients of any kind that they do and especially write as you wish. I suspect this is the wave of the future.