In her lustrous novel The Foreign Student, Susan Choi wrote of the birth pains of a Korean student attempting a life in a Southern college town.
Choi, a Korean-American, did something larger and more original than ingeniously devising a foreigner experiencing America. She devised America through the experience of the foreigner -- an America seemingly strange, largely because our own eyes hadn't known where to look. It was revelation under black light; not replacing daylight's vision but extending it to show crags we took for hills and torrents we knew as streams.
American Woman continues this feat of black-light discovery. Here the setting is not the intimate small carnages and hilarities of a college town -- with grimly illuminating flashbacks to wartime Korea -- but the radical youth activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The time is 1974. The protagonist is Jenny, a Japanese-American woman come east to hide from the authorities after participating in a California bombing. A skilled decorative painter, she finds refuge under an assumed name in Rhinebeck, a Hudson River town, where she earns room and board refurbishing her dotty landlady's gingerbread mansion.
It is an uneasily dreamlike interregnum. Revolutionary ardor -- inextricable from the exhilaration of youth and of sex in the commune with her cell leader -- has faded. Jenny is left with nothing to replace it but a tormented loyalty to her jailed lover and empty time to try to figure out the meaning of what she's been through -- and what meaning it can still hold for her.
One of Choi's foundation themes, dazzlingly developed in the jolts of the story that follows, is that of young activists borne up on America's brief insurrectional tide, then beached like ungainly gilled creatures when the tide receded.
A second theme, specific to the author, is the irony condensed within the title American Woman. As part of her activist cohort, Jenny was estranged from the American majority. As a Japanese-American she was estranged from her country; her father and grandparents were interned in World War II. And then she is estranged from her fellow radicals once the tide drops, camaraderie wanes and they fumble their way back into the separated compartments of American life.
This final, climactic estrangement is held in reserve until after the dramatic events that break in on Jenny's uneasy solitude; events narrated with desolate historical sweep and startling particular shrewdness.
Choi's writing can be difficult until we realize the difficulty is a function of its virtuosity. She gets us to share the disarray of events as Jenny experiences them. Her scenes jump from ambush, only then letting us know what they are up to. They jolt, skip and swerve; triple-stomached they stop for ruminating even as the reader, no more than single-stomached, may grow restless. Gradually a
luminous portrait takes shape of a time and of the indelibly questing figure of Jenny.
Atop a stepladder in Rhinebeck, she strips an attic rafter and listens to the radio -- her only remedy for the loneliness of the clandestine, one of the novel's themes, yet managing only to sharpen it.
A news report breaks in: the police have bloodily assaulted the hideout of the gang that kidnapped and then enlisted the daughter of a rich and powerful San Francisco family -- a close approximation of the Patty Hearst case.
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