This is a beautifully realized work, writing that at times takes my breath away. I have reread many parts of it, something I almost never do. I am a gluttonous reader, racing through books, finishing one, starting another, with barely a moment's thought in between. Though I have started, indeed almost finished, another novel in the past week, I keep coming back to this one.
It is, in part, a fictional retelling of a story familiar to most Americans anywhere near my age. It came to be known as "the Patty Hearst story," though Patty was only part of it. The larger story was about young radicals in the Viet Nam war era, so full of idealism, ego, nameless fury and rebellion, that their actions often polarized feeling against them and against the very real ideals they championed (racial and economic justice, an end to the brutal war in VN, to name a couple). In her review on Salon.com Laura Miller says of this novel that it "isn't merely a fictional retelling of the Hearst case. Instead, it's that rarest of creations, a political novel that gives equal weight to its characters' inner and outer lives."
If you are very young or if you spent the 70's in a cloister, here is one site I found where an obsessional geek has assembled a massive amount of info on the case, including pictures. In American Woman we have the story of the "lost year" when Hearst and two members of the SLA, Bill and Emily Harris, went missing, into the radical underground of the time. The point of view is that of Jenny Shimada, a young Japanese-American (based on the real-life Wendy Yoshimura), herself living underground in upstate New York. She is a peripheral member of the radical network that delivers the three escapees from California into her safekeeping and it becomes her job to hide and care for these three very damaged, not to say deranged, young people in a lonely farmhouse near the Hudson.
(Part 2 continues)
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