The would-be revolutionaries in American Woman, Susan Choi's elegant re-imagining of the murky aftermath of the Patty Hearst kidnapping saga, are defined by their fractured incompleteness. Jenny, the novel's brilliantly sketched protagonist, is a quietly capable Asian-American activist whose father is hopelessly scarred by his stint in a WWII internment camp. She lives as a fugitive while her mentor/lover rots away in jail, sending furtive messages to her through intermediaries. Kidnappers Juan and Yvonne try to maintain some semblance of order, after a fiery televised altercation with the cops leaves the other members of their revolutionary cadre dead and charred beyond recognition. American Woman's Patty Hearst surrogate, Pauline, struggles to find herself after being forcibly removed from the pampered privilege of her wealthy family and the rigid order of life with her kidnappers-turned-comrades. Meanwhile, the far-left political sphere that unites the novel's lead characters, no longer content to make its voice heard merely through protests, placards, and folk songs, struggles to remain vital following the ostensible end of a war that lent it urgency and purpose. That fractured quality extends to American Woman's narrative. Like film director Robert Bresson, Choi has a way of skipping over the elements most chroniclers would view as their very reason for telling a story. Pauline's kidnapping, a botched robbery that ends in murder, a fatal last stand against police, and even climactic arrests are alluded to in passing, skipped over, or seen as a dim reflection in life's rearview mirror. For the book's first 200 pages or so, nothing much happens. In a simultaneously dramatic and mundane setup, Jenny essentially baby-sits Juan, Yvonne, and Pauline in a rundown New York farmhouse, waiting with varying amounts of patience for the childlike trio to work on a manifesto explaining their actions. They never get far, but that's probably for the best, as it would be hard to find a less qualified spokesman for their cause than Juan, the unchallenged leader of what's left of the group–and also a bullying, sexist, arrogant jerk. After constructing a small but vividly imagined universe out of slow, meticulous detail in its first half, the novel switches to the big picture in its second half, racing forward by leaps and bounds. While some of American Woman's fussy precision gets lost, the book coalesces into an unusually sensitive, resonant coming-of-age story among the unlikely foot soldiers of a revolution that never arrived.