Don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

Arthur Salm

September 7, 2003

In Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant," an uneducated thief, hoping to better himself, asks a young woman what he should read. She suggests "The Brothers Karamazov," but he is troubled when he learns that it's a novel. He says he wants to read the truth.

"It is the truth," she tells him.

As is Susan Choi's "American Woman" (HarperCollins, 384 pages, $24.95), and not because it recapitulates – parallels, actually – infamous events. It is in fact risky literary business to set up camp in familiar territory, as any deviation from what is known, remembered, half-remembered, misremembered, can yank the reader out of the construct: No, that's not how it was, that's not what happened.

Choi doesn't tell exactly how it was, exactly what happened. Rather, the author, perhaps as successfully and as powerfully as anyone has, makes us understand how it felt, what it was like. That, too, is the truth.

It's the early 1970s. An heiress to a newspaper fortune has been kidnapped, dragged screaming from her Berkeley apartment by zealots on the radical fringe of a youth movement galvanized by opposition to the war in Vietnam. After more than a month in squalid isolation in a closet, during which time she is fed little but revolutionary tracts, she emerges, squinting, emaciated – enlightened.

On tapes secreted to the press, she renounces her parents, declares war on the establishment; employing the comically stilted socialist-realism lingo of her fuzzy-brained captors, she speaks disdainfully of capitalist insects. She and her new pals knock over a bank. When most of her cadre is burned alive during a shootout with police in Los Angeles, she and the two remaining "soldiers" take to deep cover on the East Coast ...

This novel, however, is only indirectly the story of Patricia Hearst, aka Tania (her nom de guerre). Instead – and more tellingly – it focuses on Jenny Shimada, a young artist born to former Japanese-American prisoners at the Manzanar relocation camp. Caught up in anti-war fervor, Jenny became an expert at bomb-making – taking care always that no one would be hurt in the blasts she helped engineer. For two years, she has been in hiding in New England, restoring the decrepit mansion of an eccentric, and probably broke, former society grande dame, when an old colleague hunts her down: Seems three fugitives from out west need someone to babysit them in a safe house he has established. Their names: Pauline, Juan, Yvonne.

Read: Patricia Hearst, Bill and Emily Harris.

Theirs is an isolated world of barely contained fury, and nerves shredded from sleep deprivation, paranoia and ceaseless, near-hysterical bickering. Jenny, in her late 20s, is only a few years older than the fugitives, and a kindred spirit – as far as it goes. But here, in isolation, their kill-the-pig, smash-the-state ethos comes to seem increasingly preposterous. Perhaps sensing this on some level, Juan steps up his maniacal training sessions, preparing his army of three for the inevitable battle with the United States of Amerikkka.

When a robbery goes horribly wrong, the gang splits up; Jenny and Pauline, a kind of early-day Thelma and Louise, get behind the wheel of (what else?) a Bug and take off on a meandering, phantasmagorical cross-country journey. The whole world is looking for Pauline, but no one can see her. From honky-tonks to cheap motels, they meander across America – exultant, terrified, invincible.

We see but fractured images of Pauline, none entirely in focus, all of them filtered through Jenny's maturing sensibilities. Jenny is like the others, but more and more she is realizing that she is not. Born in the U.S.A., she spent part of her childhood in Japan, taken there by her father, who is forever – and helplessly, impotently – outraged over his internment during WWII. Unable to fit in even in the land of his ancestors, he returned to Northern California, defeated, then beaten down further still by furious political battles with Jenny.

Theirs was, of course, an all-too-common generational split, made all the more painful by a giddy, seemingly uncaring fare-thee-well:

"(Jenny) remembered, years later, believing with the force that was thousands who believed just like her, that her generation was surely the luckiest, best and most blessed. Her father's generation had been the good Germans and the humiliated interned Japanese and the racist white sheriffs and the callous corrupt government, while hers had just grown more enlightened on each of their parents' mistakes. They had tasted their century's horrors before they themselves had gelled into cowards or bigots. Young enough to have fun, old enough to enjoy it! Unsurpassedly lucky! That kind of moral certainty carried with it a joy that couldn't be reconstructed in memory, once it was lost."

In San Francisco, once again in touch with friends from the Movement, Jenny and Pauline set up housekeeping in a pleasant apartment near Golden Gate Park. In this ethereal netherworld, the women form a deep but tenuous bond. "If they go to bed at all on these nights," Choi writes, "they pretend that they've fallen asleep right away, or sleep will never come. That's their ritual of separation: giving each other silence as a prelude to sleep, and then hearing the other one's breath in the compromised darkness."

They are captured, of course; we saw it on TV ("Venceramos!" cried Patty/Pauline). And oddly, wonderfully, it is in jail that Jenny at last sheds her skin – although it is not hyperbolic to suggest that in a sense, she was flayed. Her new self, her real self, emerges, and with her artist's eye she begins to detect wavelengths formerly imperceptible to her. Shimmering but unmistakable in this startling new light stands her father. They reach out to each other in a long, remarkable passage of extraordinary generosity and grace.

The structure of "American Woman" wobbles near the end. Inexplicably, Choi brings in the perspective of a female journalist; it's as if the author's confidence faltered as she neared the finish line. There are a couple of minor glitches, as well – it was not "Nixon's ex-secretary" who spilled the beans about the Oval Office audiotapes, for example – but nothing to detract seriously from this otherwise assured, accomplished work.

As for Pauline ... her return to a virtual-San Simeon lifestyle, indeed the entire out-of-rich-body experience, at last seems comprehensible, her actions in a way inevitable. Patricia endures. Pauline endures.

And Wendy? Wendy is Wendy Yoshimura, upon whom Jenny is modeled. Long out of prison, she's a successful artist living in Oakland. Look her up on the Web: Her still lifes are astonishingly clear; somehow she manages to render them in 20/10 focus – icy, remote, untouchable.

SubText

The people across the street – a whole houseful of them – were wackos. I rarely saw them, but I'd awake to find revolutionary slogans painted on the street. Sometimes the slogans were adorned with symbols that I assumed were iconic nods to this or that faction of this or that movement or cell or brigade or who-knew-what.

One evening a couple of these neighbors came to my door with a flier – an invite to one of their meetings. Not wanting to rile up the kind of folks who paint "The East is Red" in 12-foot letters, I gave them a sloppy, aw-shucks grin and stammered something like, "Gee, guys, sounds great, but I have an anthro midterm next week, and I really gotta get started on this comp lit paper ..."

They responded with withering looks, dismissing me as a dupe. I didn't think too much about it; it was Berkeley in 1970. Years later, I read that an early incarnation of the Symbionese Liberation Army had its headquarters on Channing Way. Can't know for sure that that was them, but there's a possibility that I coulda been somebody.

Instead, my sole contribution to the whole series of tragi-comic events was, shortly after Patty Hearst's capture, to scrawl "FREE TANIA" on the men's room wall of a bar in Palo Alto. I was drunk, and considered the clientele snooty. Venceramos!

Arthur Salm is

editor of Books

Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.



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