American Woman [Paperback]

I won't lie to you and say that this is an easy book to read, it isn't but it is worth the effort and it is strangely gripping, and even frightening in parts. The protagonist (and heroine) Jenny is suposedly a radical living in a time of political, economical and social upheaval. It is the 1970s and the world is no longer made up patriots and nationalists. Students are demanding change, and European ideas and politics are invading the consciousness of an insulated nation. Jenny herself is the daughter of a Japanese American man who suffered internment in the 1940s and though in the beginning she calls herself a radical, she has serious doubts about the things she has done in the past and what she is about to do. Herself a fugitive from the law, (she helped in a bombing of some Draft Offices) she is called out of hiding to help three young radicals, one of them recently the kidnap victim of the other two. It here we are introduced to Pauline, fragile, confused, and perhaps more dedicated to the cause than her once-upon-a-time captors who treat her with benign contempt mingled with reverence.

Often humourous, sometimes tragic, we are drawn into the shadowy world that Jenny and her friends inhabit. Hiding out in a farmhouse with the three dysfunctional radicals, who sprout Marxism and put themselves through harsh physical training for the war that they are sure that they will have fight in when the time comes, Jenny finds herself questioning her own ideals, along with the lack of compromise on all sides, both within the establishment she despises and the young radicals themselves. Jenny even questions even the passion that drives her charges along with the right way forward in a world built on lies, hypocrisy, racism and social injustice.

As Jenny and Pauline forge a tentative friendship, perhaps built on their mutual similarities and differences, Jenny reminisces about her life, her love affairs and her bittersweet relationship with her proud but deeply cynical father.

Jenny is very much an anti-heroine, both loved and despised in the same breath but she instils sympathy from the reader, where as Pauline is more of a spoilt little rich girl trying to break free from the constraints of her upbringing with only a glimmer of sympathy from the reader because of her emotional fragility.

There are many other interesting characters in the book like Jenny's ex-lover/friend Frazer who brings her out of hiding in the first place, and the other two radicals (once Pauline's captors) who want to change the world in a day but mostly this book is about Jenny, and Pauline with everything else weaving its way around them to bring the story, plot and climax of the novel its final conclusion.

An intellectually stimulating, intriguing and compulsive read is my final word on this novel. "American Women" can be read by readers of any nationality because all of us, young or old can remember a time when we thought the world we lived in could be changed beyond all recognition by the power of our voices, the passion of our beliefs, and the rebellious acts of our bodies, only to shed bitter tears of maturity when we realised that the establishment we sought to defeat wasn't going to fall to its knees and change was a concept of the mind rather than a physical reality.

Otherwise, I think this novel features fine (but not brilliant) psychological insight into the characters, solid plot construction, and most of all, an ambitious exploration of large questions regarding class, race, gender, political and social change, idealism and "American" self-invention. Choi's intelligence is a true pleasure, and this is her greatest strength.

However, the actual writing is a sticking point for me. Sentence by sentence, page by page, chapter by chapter, the novel feels insufficiently compressed, which makes it far too slow. The weak passages water down the strong passages. (If it had been 70-100 pages shorter, the book would be much stronger.) And sorry to say this, but stylistically, I find the writing unmemorable. There are far more gifted stylists in her generation, such as Lahiri, Haslett, Diaz, Ali, etc. But substance is her strength, like I said. I definitely look forward to the next book.