"American Woman" - Part 3

     My question when I finished the book was:  Who is the "American Woman" of the title?  Pauline?  or Jenny?  I feel it refers to them both, but that it is far more a reference to Jenny.  So, I was pleased to discover, in a Publishers' Weekly interview with Choi, that I am right.  She says:  "I don't think there's a single answer.  I guess the obvious 'American Woman' is Pauline, with her towering American pedigree, but I actually think of Jenny as being more truly that person.  People seem to view her as such a weird, foreign element, yet she was a California native."  An important part of Jenny's California pedigree is her father, detained in Manzanar with his parents as a young man, a fighter in his youth, now a bitter disillusioned old man who cannot condone her radicalism, but who loves her and wants her to survive and find a life for herself.  In the last section of the book we hear Jim Shimada's story, one that needs retelling in this new age of fear, this new era of distrust and distancing from those who don't look like "us."  The story of the Japanese internment camps is a shameful one, that has affected both Jim and Jenny, and is, I think, an integral part of Jenny's search for identity, place, peace.

     I keep wanting to quote long passages from the book.  Originally I did quote several.  And then I took them out.  Alone, torn from its integral place in the book, the quote loses its power.  These are not epigrams or aphorisms, they are organic parts of the whole.  Having read Miller's conclusion in the Salon.com review I must end with it, because I realize there is no way I could say it better.

"American Woman feels organic, not constructed;  it's a mature, fully realized work that does everything a novel should do and seldom does in this day and age.  It shows us the ways that character can be destiny, the big and the little forces that control our lives, the possibility that our worst choices will ultimately seem worth it, and the strange and circuitous paths by which a soul as lost as Jenny Shimada's can find its way home."