This year, Susan Choi was nominated for the Booker Prize for her new book, Flashlight, but we’re headed back in time twenty years to her second novel, American Woman. Even in this early work, later motifs in Choi’s work have become apparent. For example, American Woman’s main character bombs a building in protest, which gets echoed five years later as a central conceit in A Person of Interest. There’s a fair amount of reflection over whose story gets told and whose gets omitted, which is critical to Trust Exercise, released in 2019. My understanding is that Choi’s most recent work also makes reference to intergenerational narration with leaps back and forth across time—but I’ll need to get to Flashlight sometime later.
All things considered, American Woman was fine-to-good. It held the trademarks of Choi’s psychological probing and the moments of philosophizing between the pages of an otherwise character-driven piece. The book has a blessing and a curse when it comes to editing: there are passages that seem superfluous and it feels like the book could have been at least fifty pages shorter; at the same time, the book turns away from what feel like monumental events, like character deaths and failed heists. Part of what the novel is grappling with, though, is the way that we have selective focus. The book tells us the story is not about what we’ve been reading about, but something else entirely.
But we’ve gotten too conceptual too quickly. Here’s what the book is “about.” Jenny is a Japanese-American woman who bombed a government building in protest of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Prior to the book’s opening, Jenny relocates and works as a caretaker and restorer of a historic home in upstate New York. Frazer, a civil rights activist with a deep network of subversives, begins the book by tracking her down. They have history together and they have history together, but now he needs a favour. He has in his care a group of violent subversives who killed a number of police officers and who are the only ones of their cadre left alive after the slaughter. He needs to hide them and wants Jenny to tend to them while they write a book that will help make him a fortune. Their claim to fame is that they kidnapped the richest daughter in America and radicalized her to be one of them. She, Pauline, is under the care and tutelage of Juan and Yvonne as they hide from the authorities and drag Jenny into their mess.
The book meanders some while the characters are impelled (but continue not) to write their book, becoming an increasing drain on Jenny. That said, there are some moments that hit hard and some ambiguity over the political questions in the text. Choi refuses to provide audiences with the comfort of unambiguous answers. For example, what feels uncontroversial to me (resistance to the Vietnam war, advocating for civil rights) is complicated by Juan, the de facto leader of the cadre. Despite the stated aims towards equality, Juan is a domineering leader who comes across as misogynistic in many of his interactions with Jenny, Yvonne, and Pauline. Worse, maybe, is that during a late night conversation with Jenny he professes how she’s so much closer to reality and the revolution because of her race and, essentially, that it is a privilege to be the victim of racism. It’s sort of like the uncomfortable conversations in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The whole conversation had my stomach twisting with discomfort: this figure of leftist revolution is steeped with racist (‘reverse racist’?) ideologies and seems totally oblivious to the Japanese internment camps (to which Jenny’s father was subjected.) Even Frazer’s attempt to do right by the criminals is compromised by his profiteering over their story. As with all things, it feels like the profit motive subsumes all intentions, noble or not.
Later, there’s a compelling twist where Pauline, the oblivious rich girl playing revolutionary, turns out to have masterminded a plot against Jenny, her seeming ally. The cadre plans a heist against one of Jenny’s contacts, and she is the critical piece standing in the way. Pauline is treated critically by Juan and Yvonne and she manipulates the situation to get closer to Jenny, winning her over to their side. It’s a compelling twist when Jenny realizes what has happened.
As I mentioned, there were a number of moments where the action is omitted, casting the audience into the fog of war. For instance, when the group finally gets the go ahead for the heist, it goes poorly. We don’t see the scene as a play-by-play, but only as a retrospective. Hence, we don’t get to see how someone ends up shot, and for some time it’s unclear whether Yvonne and Juan even survived. From there, we instead see Jenny and Pauline’s ride to their new lives and a new book essentially begins, one which recounts the fugitives’ search for a more regular, quiet life. In that section, psychological meditations persist. There’s question of whether the two are in love, or just what kind of relationship this is, exactly.
Running parallel to the main narrative is the story of Jenny’s father. I appreciate what Choi is doing here, drawing parallels with the injustice of Japanese internment camps and the injustice of the Vietnam war. Most of the memories from Jenny’s past, though, didn’t feel particularly resonant to me. In the last third of the book, there’s an account of the escape from the internment camp and Jenny’s father’s role (or lack of role) within it. The implications echo through the decades.
For all the book covers, I felt that the end of the book felt rushed. The last fifty pages or so account for the capture of various fugitives and how they respond to their apprehension—but the focus is not really the focus. Part of the book is about how the media reshapes stories, how the truth gets lost in retelling. So, the story isn’t so much about how the characters respond to being arrested and tried, but about how the public interprets the situation. Similarly, the book’s focus is not about events, but rather how characters respond to them—and more importantly, how readers respond. At the part of the book that would be the climax, we shift towards the past with Jenny’s father’s story. This formal choice seems to imply that the true heart of the story is not even what we see in the present, but deeply rooted in the past.
These formal flares help to carry the novel’s overall themes. Choi’s knack for psychological exploration and the surprise turns of the novel make it engaging, although I admit that the text felt a little bloated and repetitive. I think there’s a masterful hand at work here, but one still seeking its stride. The themes are well-worth discussing, but it requires some more digging and effort than I suspect average readers would be willing to engage in.
Happy reading!
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