Trance [Hardcover]

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.

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