American Woman: A Novel

This is a must-read. I liked Susan Choi's first novel very much, and recommended it to a number of people, but "American Woman" is fabulous at a whole different level. Beautifully written; compelling psychology; great settings; intense & fast-paced plot. This is really on my short list of impressive MAJOR novels by American novelists: it's not to say that they're always my favorites, but Choi's novel deserves to be compared to Franzen's The Corrections, to Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, to Whitehead's John Henry Days. Ambitious but also brilliantly executed. You must read this book!

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/fri

This book is a gorgeous, unpredictable mystery--I turned the pages with my stomach in knots, wondering what would happen next. The story is at once familiar --the radicals with their VWs, the description of San Francisco and Berkeley in the late '60s--and deeply moving. Choi writes about these hopeful, striving characters with honesty and quiet decency, and in telling their stories raises unsettling questions about the stories we see being played out on the news every day.

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.