“Susan Choi…proves herself a natural—a writer whose intelligence and historical awareness effortlessly serve a breathtaking narrative ability. I couldn’t put American Woman down, and wanted when I finished it to do nothing but read it again.” —Joan Didion
A novel of impressive scope and complexity, “American Woman is a thoughtful, meditative interrogation of…history and politics, of power and racism, and finally, of radicalism.” (San Francisco Chronicle), perfect for readers who love Emma Cline’s novel, The Girls.
On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, 25-year-old Jenny Shimada agrees to care for three younger fugitives whom a shadowy figure from her former radical life has spirited out of California. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity for embracing her captors' ideology and joining their revolutionary cell.
"A brilliant read...astonishing in its honesty and confidence,” (Denver Post) American Woman explores the psychology of the young radicals, the intensity of their isolated existence, and the paranoia and fear that undermine their ideals.
Susan Choi was born in Indiana and grew up in Texas. Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Discover Great New Writers Award at Barnes & Noble. With David Remnick, she edited an anthology of fiction entitled Wonderful Town: New York Stories from the New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Red Hook is little more than the junction of a couple of roads, with a farm store, a church and graveyard, a diner. And the post office, a small square cement building with RED HOOK NY 12571 spelled out in metal letters across the flat gray façade. He keeps flying through this sparse nexus of structures, first along the south-north road, then, when he finally manages to slow down and make the turn, along the east-west. He has the idea that the rest of the town must lie just farther on, and that the diner and farm store and church and post office are a far-flung outpost, but he keeps ending up twenty-odd miles away in front of a sign welcoming him to a new town, and so he keeps turning back and retracing his route. He doesn't even see houses in Red Hook, just fence lines along the roads, a dirt drive sometimes winding away. Some of the fences contain fields and some just grass and grazing animals, but everywhere there are smooth humps of hills and distant darknesses of untouched woodland, interesting vistas to the harried urban man. He's enjoying tearing up and down these roads, like swinging hard through the same arc again and again, and catching the same glimpse of the sorry little huddle at the center point, and he keeps atit for a while pointlessly, up down, zoom zoom, but finally he's forced to conclude that he's not missing anything. At the post office he parks and goes in to take a look at her box. If there were a tiny window in the little metal door he would stoop and peer in, but there isn't. At the diner he orders coffee and a jelly donut and tries to figure out where all the people live. A man in overalls asks another man at the counter how to get somewhere. "I'm from over-river," he explains. Back in his car Frazer studies the map. The Hudson lies west of here, about a ten-minute drive on these roads. Might be pretty. Frazer knows he is possessed of the skills to solve such problems as the one that lies before him. He can recognize, for example, that right now he is looking too hard at the wrong thing, and missing the point. He needs to do something else, maybe even give up for the day, find a bar and a motel, and start fresh in the morning. He should have realized that she wouldn't live here; she wouldn't want to be too near the post office. Yet she wouldn't want to travel too far. This is the sort of zero-sum compromise she makes all the time; Frazer knows this about her, having been subjected to the same flawed formulation. Trust Frazer or spurn him? A little of both? He notices, thinking of the man in overalls from over-river, that there aren't so many bridges: just four in the 150-mile stretch from the city to Albany. One lies due west of here, but Frazer's willing to bet that Jenny wouldn't cross the river for her mail. Too much traffic concentration, too confined; there's no good exit from a bridge. He puts an X on Red Hook, then estimates a half hour's driving distance and draws a circle around Red Hook with that radius. He does this mostly to amuse himself, but also because he believes in the inflexibility, predictability, knowability of people. They never stray far from their familiar realms of being. The most shocking act, closely examined, is just a louder version of some habitual gesture. No one is ever "out of character." That idea just makes Frazer laugh.
The next morning he rises early and nearly pulls the room down in the course of his exercise. He usually travels with a pair of very small, very heavy barbells, but when he finds himself without them he does other things. Five hundred jumping jacks. One-armed push-ups. He'll stand on his head for a while, and feel the pressure of the blood in his skull and the fumes of last night's alcohol steaming out of his pores. On this day he's well into the spirit of things when he grabs the bathroom door frame and pulls himself into the air, legs thrust forward a little because he's tall and the door frame is small. Then the molding around the frame - after holding him for a beat during which he does nothing but hang there, blinking confusedly, as if sensing what's coming - peels away with a terrible shriek of nails extracting from wood. Although the disaster is preceded by that beat, when it happens it happens all at once, before he can think or find his legs, and he lands heavily on his ass like a sack of grain. There is abrupt, alarming pain. He keels over sideways and lies there curled up, half of him on one side of the door and half of him on the other. He has the yellowish linoleum of the bathroom floor against his ear, and his face is contorted, partly an effort to keep the tears that have filled his eyes from streaming down his cheeks, but they do anyway.
He gives up and cries a little, quietly. In truth, sacrosanct as his exercise is, he is a little embarrassed by it - perhaps because it is so sacrosanct. He remembers being surprised once by Mike Sorsa, in the apartment they'd shared in North Berkeley. He'd always waited until Sorsa left for class, and he'd heard the door slam downstairs and Sorsa's footsteps cross the creaking wood porch and drop onto the sidewalk, but on this morning, almost an hour after Sorsa had left, he'd unexpectedly come home. Frazer had been so deeply enveloped in his routine and in the music he'd put on to accompany himself he hadn't heard anything until Sorsa was standing there in the doorway ...
“Deeply impressive: confident, historically astute, psychologically persuasive … beautiful and disturbing… a work of real achievement.”
Dan Cryer
“An artful, insightful meditation on the radical impulse ...a complex and layered work.”
Joy Press
“A hypnotic, winding route through the scorched emotional landscape of 1974.”
Jhumpa Lahiri
“With uncompromising grace and mastery, Susan Choi renders the intimate moments which bring to life a tale of prodigious sweep.”
Reading Group Guide
Introduction
In American Woman, Susan Choi assembles a fictionalized recasting of the notorious 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. On this historical framework, Choi drapes a tale pulsing with immediacy, as we follow the aftermath of a violent shootout and life on the run.
Jenny Shimada, young Japanese-American woman, hides out in upstate New York, on the lam after bombing draft offices in California. Robert Frazer, a former acquaintance in the countercultural movement, finds Jenny and persuades her to aid three younger radical fugitives whom Frazer has smuggled across the country. One in particular, Pauline, the granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, shocked the nation by denouncing her family and espousing the views of her captors. Despite her initial misgivings, Jenny agrees to move into a secluded rural farmhouse with the fugitives, acting as a buffer between the cadre and the outside world, taking care of their needs while they write a book to fund, and further the aims of, the revolution.
The complex negotiations and various frictions between the foursome eventually culminate in botched robbery attempt that sends Jenny and Pauline careening on a hallucinatory road trip back to California. A meditation on individual belief and the zeitgeist, a droll send-up of the self-anointed morally superior, and a flawless character study, American Woman explores a turbulent era in which the last flickering embers of liberal radicalism and youthful idealism smoldered.
Questions for Discussion
How would you characterize Robert Frazer?
Is Pauline's status within the group secure? Does Jenny ever become accepted?
Are commonly held notions regarding the glamour and romance of life on the run -- coded telephone calls, wiping off fingerprints, disguises, rerouted letters, safe houses, etc -- still intact? How does this account differ from most other fiction, or even cinematographic depictions?
In what ways does she surprise her captors? Do you think her conversion to the radical cause was genuine or the result of Stockholm syndrome type brainwashing? In the end, is Pauline any less of an enigma?
How does Jenny react to Juan's praise and goading about her "non-white-skin privilege?" Why do most people she encounters inquire into her country of origin, and how does she respond?
What is the significance of Jenny's relationship with her father? How do his internment and their five-year sojourn in Japan lead to her participation in the radical movement?
Does "living in the times," as Jenny did, preclude the ability to discern your own convictions? Is it possible to distinguish one's own beliefs from the rush of the national mood today?
In Part 4, a journalist covering Pauline's case thinks of Jenny and Pauline as "the two girls who thought they could make history, while all the while it had made them." What does she mean? Do you agree?
Given the attempts by the counterculture movement to reshape society, what conclusions does American Woman draw regarding America's pervading class and ethnic rigidity? Do you think the movement was successful? How does wealth inure Pauline and Dolly from the vagaries of life?
Who does the "American Woman" of the title refer to? Given the fact that the female protagonists of American Woman are fugitives from the law, do you find the title ironic? How is each woman estranged from society, and in what ways does this novel reassess what it means to be an American Woman?
About the Author
Susan Choi was born in Indiana and grew up in Texas. Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Discover Great New Writers Award at Barnes & Noble. With David Remnick, she edited an anthology of fiction entitled Wonderful Town: New York Stories from the New Yorker. In 2004 Susan Choi was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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