In American Woman, Susan Choi assembles a fictionalized recasting of the notorious 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. On this historical framework, Choi drapes a tale pulsing with immediacy, as we follow the aftermath of a violent shootout and life on the run.

Jenny Shimada, young Japanese-American woman, hides out in upstate New York, on the lam after bombing draft offices in California. Robert Frazer, a former acquaintance in the countercultural movement, finds Jenny and persuades her to aid three younger radical fugitives whom Frazer has smuggled across the country. One in particular, Pauline, the granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, shocked the nation by denouncing her family and espousing the views of her captors. Despite her initial misgivings, Jenny agrees to move into a secluded rural farmhouse with the fugitives, acting as a buffer between the cadre and the outside world, taking care of their needs while they write a book to fund, and further the aims of, the revolution.

The complex negotiations and various frictions between the foursome eventually culminate in botched robbery attempt that sends Jenny and Pauline careening on a hallucinatory road trip back to California. A meditation on individual belief and the zeitgeist, a droll send-up of the self-anointed morally superior, and a flawless character study, American Woman explores a turbulent era in which the last flickering embers of liberal radicalism and youthful idealism smoldered.