Radical fantasy, SLA-style

Politics beckons the artist. The world’s vexed histories have a ready-made appeal for readers -- rooting interests, partisan interests, plenty of chances to satisfy the lust for moral outrage. And without our help, we think history isn’t good enough. We all need the actors’ motives revealed at a level only the imagination can reach. We need to know the fantasies that made reality.

Politics, though, can be a fatal attraction for an artist. In a work of literature, Stendhal famously said, politics is “like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert ... loud and vulgar, and yet a thing it is not possible to ignore.” Politics, that is to say, can wreck the texture of imaginative work. Susan Choi here bases her novel on the remnants of the Symbionese Liberation Army -- characters guaranteed to arouse partisanship, contempt or moral opprobrium, all of which would ruin the novel’s music. But Choi handles that difficulty with an amazing sense of control.

She begins her story obliquely. A police shootout has already destroyed most of the SLA, leaving only a few shards, including their box-office star, the kidnapped upper-class ingenue who converted to their cause. The SLA is unnamed here, but it is the SLA, and the character called “Pauline” is, of course, Patricia Hearst, more or less. I know Patricia Hearst only through People magazine, so she has always seemed just “more or less” a Patricia Hearst to me, to begin with. And the SLA was always a creature of our imagination too. A series of evanescent bloody fantasies, the SLA was mostly what the media and the audience’s savage dreams made of it -- except, that is, for its very real bullets.

As the novel begins, Frazer, a bald left-wing hustler, sniffs the crowd-pleasing opportunity in the SLA story. He wants to broker a book by these jamokes, make a buck and “get their message out.” So he transports the two surviving loons and Pauline to a farmhouse in upstate New York and finds a minder for them, the character who will become the center of the novel -- here called Jenny Shimada and apparently based on a minor player in the SLA story, Wendy Yoshimura. For her own reasons, Jenny has been hiding upstate, doing restoration work on the estate of a rich and racist harridan. Choi gives a compelling sense of focus to Jenny’s work -- and to all the novel’s physical settings, Jenny being more taken up with the details of the world than with the people in it. The harridan, for example, is, like much of the supporting cast, a caricature. But perhaps that’s always our revenge on the rich; we reduce them to mannerisms and save the inner life for the Proustian hero. Or Jenny.

Jenny has a past. She’s hiding because she and her boyfriend bombed domestic targets during the Vietnam War, leaving him in prison and her on the lam. Jenny planted bombs -- or so she tell us -- despite hating violence. She just wanted to wake the country up; if someone like her did such things to stop the war, then everyone would realize that war was a very bad thing. Jenny, clearly, is attached to her moral superiority. My own memory of the ‘60s is that the people around Jenny would have tested her rectitude more, hectoring her with a barrage of repetitive -- and vulgar -- arguments. They would have called her an “adventurist” or pointed out that politics is not the place to play out one’s moral dramas. Or they would have admired her all too hysterically, for reasons that might have troubled her more than the critiques, loving the violence that they hoped would provoke more violence. But the novel -- for its own aesthetic reasons -- tones this din down and so leaves Jenny protected from self-examination. For a while, anyway.

Similarly, the reader wonders, more than Jenny does for most of the novel, why someone like Jenny -- calm and thinking herself moral -- would be attracted to the SLA, a group whose first political act was the viciously idiotic assassination of a black school official. Why would she be fascinated with the Patty Hearst character instead of simply being appalled by her kidnapping? Again, there are novelistic reasons for Jenny’s blindness to her own motives; it will allow her to attain an artistically satisfying understanding at the end.

At Frazer’s urging, Jenny agrees to become the SLA nanny. Life on the farm with the unhinged “cadre” is well done, a portrait of psychotics made crazier by their shock and grief -- zombies animated by galvanic charges. Juan, the de facto “commander,” has them all practice cartoonish versions of military maneuvers and do truth-or-dare-style “ego reconstruction” exercises. Naturally, Pauline whines over a splinter and can’t stand either live mice or to see a mouse killed, a squeamishness meant to mark her class and signify her heedlessness. After all, her squeamishness didn’t extend to bank guards. She prattles like a needy kid. Pauline may be fascinating to Jenny, but she remains (like the harridan) a caricature. Or perhaps Pauline is fascinating to Jenny because she is such a caricature,a fantasy version of the upper class itself.

Was Pauline/Patricia “brainwashed” to join the SLA? Pauline-the-fantasy is not in focus enough for us to decide, but she does look like a woman who was always desperate for acceptance. This the SLA offered, along with a way out of the closet where they’d confined her blindfolded and a chance to surrender all responsibility for her actions. This crew is not likely to write anything but fragmentary, comic rants. So they turn instead to planning an armed robbery of a local grocery. Jenny pulls back at this, and Pauline pleads with her to stay, saying the others will kill her if she doesn’t persuade Jenny to join up. Jenny knows Pauline has concocted this threat yet agrees to drive the getaway car. But why? Again, this question hangs there so that it can be snapped closed at the end.

The robbery is botched, an innocent man is killed and Pauline and Jenny flee the scene of the crime, the two of them together at last. Their time on the lam, their growing closeness, form a convincing idyll -- for Jenny anyway.

The FBI breaks up their nest, and the book rounds into its complication and completion. Jenny, in jail and afterward, recognizes that her rectitude was always fueled by unacknowledged rage, a fury satisfyingly left for the reader to fully interpret. Race is surely its central element, given the seemingly casual racism of virtually all the characters, even her “comrades.” (“Oriental people always have exceptional aim,” Juan says. “They’re inherently good marksmen.”) And also the not-at-all-casual racism embodied in Manzanar, the wartime detention camp for Japanese Americans and the site of Jenny’s father’s exclusion from his own nation, the demonic place of his humiliation. All this, we infer, sent Jenny on the path toward violence -- and into Pauline’s arms.

So the story is revealed as a love affair between Jenny and a phantom: Pauline represents Jenny’s inclusion in America’s upper class, with its insouciant elegance, its divine sloppiness, its carelessness toward store owners and bank guards. Jenny, like Pauline, craves acceptance by a fantasy. Pauline sells her out to the prosecution. Having adored a specter, Jenny wakes empty and bitter. The aesthetic effects of the book -- Jenny’s late self-knowledge, the convincing (though somewhat simplistic) way that issues of race and class are raised at the end -- have been bought, as artistic effects often are, at a price: a reduction of the vulgarity of the real. But there is, by way of compensation, a compelling exactness in the writing about Jenny’s psychology, a focus that gives these delayed epiphanies considerable power.

The Asian community rallies for Jenny, as it did for Wendy Yoshimura, and she gets off relatively lightly for the bombings, though she neither sympathizes with this racial solidarity nor asks for it. Jenny often sees other people stereotypically; and people, in turn, understand her stereotypically. She’s not alone in that, of course; fantasy confronts fantasy in the confusion that gives rise to love, to hatred, to politics. And to gunshots. *