No survivors, the radio reports. Jenny, who like much of the left deplored the kidnapping, is in anguish, nonetheless. She doesn't know that three have survived, among them the Patty Hearst figure (here named Pauline); and are on their way through the old underground network to seek her help hiding out.
Rob, a kind of underground middleman -- part wheeler-dealer, part saint -- fetches Jenny and drops her at a rented farmhouse where the three have shut themselves in a bedroom, emerging at first only to strut, glower and gulp wine.
Jenny is to act as den mother to a litter that resembles fetal blue sharks (who eat each other inside the womb) more than wolf cubs.
The first part of American Woman tells of Jenny's strained efforts to help. Juan, the truculent gun-brandishing leader, imposes Maoist thought control on Yvonne, his lover, and Pauline. The three do regimented jogs and calisthenics (Jenny thinks of Japanese schoolchildren exercising in lockstep), followed by military drill.
Choi has written a fascinating portrait of dangerous fragility. To galvanize his cohort -- and himself -- Juan organizes a harebrained robbery. It goes lethally wrong. They flee; Juan and Yvonne disappearing via the network (years later they are living ordinary lives); and Jenny, who had furiously opposed the venture, rescuing the hapless Pauline and driving west.
The shootout and flight are done as a pulsing jump-cut. They are followed by the hallucinatory randomness of Jenny's drive, with Pauline didactic, tearfully panicked and oozily affectionate. They describe discursive circles through the Great Plains. It suggests the last half-inch of bathwater eddying sluggishly down the drain. It's Choi's image, as well, for the final soapy gurgle of the armed illusions of the 1970s.
The final section is a different irony and the book's grave heart. First we go to Jenny's father, a gardener, and his wartime internment. This lays ground for what follows. Arrested, Pauline falsely implicates Jenny as a fellow terrorist.
Pauline gets a harsh sentence but in two years is paroled back to her family privileges. Jenny, sentenced lightly, is out sooner. But her meditation is a heavy conclusion about America's pervading class and ethnic rigidity.
Pauline's sentence would seem to amount to equal justice for all "but she would still emerge somehow restored, made more interesting by her adventure, a reinforcer, in the end, of the privilege she'd once seemed to spurn." Jenny, with her light sentence, "would feel, perhaps indelibly, a new shame ... as if she were the lucky recipient of some benign power's unusually good graces."
RSS