American Woman: A Novel [Paperback]

Second, I have to agree with the reviewer who says that Choi captures absolutely none of the flavor of the 1970s. It seems to me that Choi may have made the decision to avoid period touches altogether, worried as she might have been that they would ring false. However, the result of this compromise is a book with no period character whatsoever. Our sole markers of the era are occasional references to the date and the presence, in a supporting role, of an old VW Bug. I don't mean the book should be clotted with popcult references, like Stephen King, but the sense I got is that Choi didn't even bother to check out what was on TV, on the radio, or what was in the news. The false sense is given of history on a momentous scale--VIETNAM! NIXON! WATERGATE! Not only does this avoid the sort of minor quotidian stuff that really would have underlined the existence and background of these petit-bourgeois revolutionaries manque, but it seems lazy.

Some details seem just flat-out wrong. Roof parties in Berkeley? Not that I recall, but maybe I'm wrong.

The writing is OK. Choi is good when she keeps it simple, she has quite a dry sense of humor that she doesn't use nearly enough. There are altogether too many creative-writing-y reveries in the book--there's one about matches, you know, paper matches, that had me howling--that should have been blue penciled right away.

Anyway, this book is OK. You want to like it because it is, as another half-hearted reviewer put it, so earnest and heartfelt. On the other hand, the book unfolds so narrowly, you wonder why Choi selected such sweeping source material, rich with so much possibility, if all she intended to do was write a claustrophobic little character study. You can see her shoving intriguing possibilities to the sidelines to concentrate on the frankly boring relationship between Jenny Shimada and "Pauline" (the Patty Hearst character). Who cares!, I wanted to shout. Tell me more about the cadre! Tell me more about their goals. Are they ridiculous? Are they righteous? Is it ambiguous? Tell me about Rob Frazer. Are his motives selfish? Tell me more about Pauline--about her ambivalence, her relationship not with her old patrician class vs. her new revolutionary vanguard, but with actual people in her lives past and present. How is Jenny a link between the two? Etc.

This is a very well meaning book by a sincere author with some talent. I detect the ham handed interference of an editor, and the effacement of absolutely anything that might suggest, legally, that the book is based on the adventures of Patricia Hearst with the Symbionese Liberation Army leads me to believe that HarperCollins had corporate rather than first amendment lawyers go over the manuscript. Too bad on both counts. I'd've loved to see the "real" book.