USA Today
Choi gives us an intelligently rendered book that reminds us how fascinating Hearst's story -- and the times that spawned it -- really were. Anne Stephenson
The Washington Post
Choi has worked very hard to imagine Jenny Shimada's experience, and at its best, American Woman delivers a real feeling for what it was like to be this human being living through both her individual life and the ongoing history of that moment. In particular, Choi supplies a compelling account of Jenny's life before her time with Pauline and the fugitives, when she is refinishing the interior of a mansion in the Hudson Valley and dreamily removed from time and history. Moments like these provide much of the novel's satisfaction. Tom Piazza
The Village Voice
The intense friendship between these two women rises through the novel's sophisticated, drifting structure, resulting in a brief Thelma and Louise-style lost weekend before reality intrudes on their exile, and they're forced to pay their debt to society.
The New York Times
American Woman becomes a love story of sorts. It takes us through a peculiar, psychologically instructive cycle, moving from the sensationalism of the daily news, to the convoluted group psychology of four differently idealistic but misguided souls struggling for their survival, to the subtlest tropisms of the heart's retrospective longing. But Choi does not keep a moral scorecardquestions of right and wrong are, rightly, left to the reader.Sven Birkerts
The New Yorker
Set in 1974, Choi’s second novel follows the outlines of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, taking as its heroine one of the minor players in the drama. Jenny Shimada, who once bombed government buildings, has been living underground for two years when the kidnapping occurs. From three thousand miles away in the Hudson Valley, she follows the story obsessively: the cadre’s wild demands; the victim’s apparent conversion to the cause; the police siege in which most of the group burns to death. What she doesn’t suspect is that she will soon be chaperoning the surviving fugitives in a Catskills farmhouse as they attempt to write their memoirs, a money-making scheme cooked up by a former comrade. Jenny’s charges prove to be far more than she can handle, and things go comically, horrifically awry. The novel takes a hard-eyed look at American idealism, and yet its imaginative abundance, its fascination with self-invention, and its portrayal of the landscape as a living, breathing presence provide a quintessentially American sense of possibility.
Publishers Weekly
The Patty Hearst kidnapping was one of the defining incidents of the 1970s, but almost 30 years later, it has faded into legend, despite the many words written on the subject. Choi (The Foreign Student) makes the first stab at fictionalizing the drama, giving it grainy psychological depth and texture, while cleaving close to the true course of events. Instead of focusing on Patty (here named Pauline, the daughter of a wealthy newspaper publisher), Choi turns her attention on Jenny Shimada, a young Japanese-American woman, who, fleeing the Feds after she and her boyfriend orchestrate the bombing of draft offices to protest the Vietnam War, agrees to help Pauline and her kidnappers. This protagonist is based on a real-life person, Wendy Yoshimura, who spent what's now called "the lost year" (1974, when Patty and her captors disappeared) with Patty and two of her kidnappers. In Choi's book, the four spend the time in a rented farmhouse in New York State, with Jenny running errands while Pauline and her "comrades" undergo physical training for their fight against "the pigs" and halfheartedly write a book. While the unfolding drama-Pauline's transformation, the bank robbery, Pauline and Jenny's cross-country trip-is enthralling, it is Choi's skill at getting inside the heads of her protagonists that gives the novel its particular, unsettling appeal. What makes Jenny a radical? And what then leads her to wonder whether "perhaps they had been wrong to fight Power on its terms, instead of rejecting its terms utterly"? Sounding the depths of her conflicted protagonists, Choi takes an uncompromising look at issues of race, class, war and peace. Agent, Bill Clegg. (Sept. 5) Forecast: HarperCollins plans a seven-city author tour, ads in the New Yorker and an NPR campaign. A reading group guide and blurbs from Joan Didion and Jhumpa Lahiri may draw in women readers, and the book's unusual hook could help it get coverage in both the mainstream and alternative press. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
After making an auspicious debut with The Foreign Student, Choi delivers a mesmerizing second effort. Inspired by the Patty Hearst kidnapping and extending issues raised in Philip Roth's American Pastoral, this novel sustains its own unwavering, original voice concerning race and politics in the 1970s. Jenny Shimada is a young Japanese American activist in hiding from the government in upstate New York after participating in bombings to protest the Vietnam War. She becomes the ward of three radical fugitives from California, including Pauline, the daughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate, whose kidnapping and conversion to the "cause" has made her a celebrity. When a robbery goes awry, Pauline and Jenny end up on an intense cross-country journey back to the West Coast and the divisive fate awaiting them there. Choi crafts complex, believable characters whose lives intersect with American politics over issues of loss, betrayal, economics, and identity. How it all comes together in an engrossing and emotive story is testament to Choi's deft narration. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/03.]-Prudence Peiffer, Southampton, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An ambitious version of the Patty Hearst story: the result is intellectually provocative and vividly imagined but weighed down by its intentions. Despite some fine writing, Choi's second with a Japanese-American protagonist (the award-winning Foreign Student, 1998) seems as much like a seminar-on class, race, and power-as it does a novel. And although protagonist Jenny Shimada shares her thoughts about her life, her past, and her present experiences, she remains as abstract as the ideas she's grappling with. At the start, 25-year-old Jenny, who, with lover William (now in prison), had bombed federal buildings in protest against the Vietnam War, is hiding out in New York State, working under an alias as she restores an old house. She's tracked down by Frazer, a former activist, who asks her to take care of Juan, Yvonne, and Pauline, who not only robbed a bank but escaped a fire in California that killed many of their co-conspirators. Frazer has rented a remote farmhouse and wants the group to write a book that will tell their story, especially Pauline's, in order to make money both for him and for their cause. As Jenny recalls her alienation from her Japanese-American father, who deplores her activism (though it's his wartime internment that made him anti-American), she tries to keep the trio focused. But the others prefer to exercise, shoot guns, and compose tapes exhorting revolution-all a worry to Jenny, who is against indiscriminate violence. She observes that Pauline, the heiress, is as dedicated as the other two, and, after a robbery goes fatally awry, the group separates. Jenny and Pauline flee New York and start driving west. On the run, Jenny tries to understand Pauline as sherecalls, not persuasively, her privileged birth and her reasons for cooperating with the revolutionaries. But the police are on their track, and betrayal is in the air. Jenny must think hard about her own moral choices. Earnest but disappointing. Author tour. Agent: Bill Clegg/Burnes & Clegg
Jennifer Egan
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 … Jenny’s wrenching struggle to come to terms with what she’s done makes the book resonate with compassion and regret …. [AMERICAN WOMAN] is a complex and layered work.
Minna Proctor
What I find so genuinely exhilarating about Choi’s project is her old-fashioned intrepidness, her desire to plunder history without apology in order to recover its heart.
Oregonian
Brilliant … Choi’s insightful understanding, vivid description, lyrical use of language and deft dialogue make it an overall reading pleasure.
Denver Post
A brilliant read … astonishing in its honesty and confidence AMERICAN WOMAN is a haunting book.
Vogue
Riveting … Choi has the rare gift of bringing such notorious moments of history back to life and making them altogether new.
Vanity Fair
Prepare to be held hostage by Susan Choi’s mesmerizing AMERICAN WOMAN.
Joy Press
A hypnotic, winding route through the scorched emotional landscape of 1974 … Choi’s prose radiates intelligence as she traces circles around Jenny and Pauline - near enough that you can feel their warmth, but not so close that you’d ever nail them down.
Francisco Goldman
Few writers since Graham Greene have brought such tender, insightful, poetic, intelligent, darkly comic writing to the political thriller.
New York Times
Historical sweep and startling particular shrewdness … Choi has written a fascinating portrait of dangerous fragility.
Jay Cantor
An amazing sense of control …[and] a compelling exactness…fantasy confronts fantasy in the confusion that gives rise to love, to hatred, to politics. And to gunshots.
Joan Didion
Susan Choi in this second novel proves herself a naturala 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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
With uncompromising grace and mastery, Susan Choi renders the intimate moments which bring to life a tale of prodigious sweep.
Laura Miller
Masterfully plotted ….AMERICAN WOMAN is that rarest of creations, a political novel that gives equal weight to its characters’ inner and outer lives.
San Diego Union-Tribune
Extraordinary generosity and grace …. the author, perhaps as successfully and as powerfully as anyone has, makes us understand how it felt, what it was like …[an] assured, accomplished work.
Sven Birkerts
In the manner of Don DeLillo’s Libra or Joyce Carol Oates in Black Water…[Choi] takes us straight into one of the strangest segments of our ever surreal American dream life.
San Francisco Chronicle
AMERICAN WOMAN with its historical acuity and sprawling interior intimacy further confirms that Susan Choi is a writer of scope, ambition and undeniable talent.
Jhumpa Lahiri*
With uncompromising grace and mastery, Susan Choi renders the intimate moments which bring to life a tale of prodigious sweep.