Suspenseful Actions In Susan Choi's American Woman

Susan Choi’s American Woman, is an intense novel, written after The Foreign Student, and drawn from the events of the 1974 kidnapping of a newspaper heiress, Patty Hearst. Susan Choi’s novel is suspenseful and sensational in many places, it’s serious in others, American Woman is an analysis of a person’s self, which has been shaped by the events of the past and pursued by the uncertainty of whether those specific actions were even actually necessary to begin with. The novel begins in upstate New York, which is where Jenny Shimada, who is a radical Japanese-American woman, is hiding, because she bombed many government offices, though they were empty, with her lover, William always throughout the night, injuring nobody. These actions, which at the time she believed were statements against the Vietnam War, a way of protesting it, even perceived as a way of “overthrowing” the idea of the war. With her past actions and her justifications for the violent things she and William had done, are called into question when an old friend, Rob Frazer, asks her to take care of three radical young revolutionaries like themselves: Yvonne, Juan, and Pauline. These three fugitives are the only remaining members of the cadre …show more content…
The reader watches Jenny Shimada’s principles become a part of history. In the space of just a few years, it was an exceptionally altered world, where even the strongest forms of resistance were strangely innocent compared to her and what she had done. “She and William had taken such pride in their careful actions, but they owed more to luck than they would have ever of wished to admit. Mere dumb luck, the god she’d so slavishly served in her year with Pauline, all the while believing it was not luck, but righteousness that preserved them.” (Choi