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Overview
A Los Angeles Times Book Review Favorite Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Novel of the Year
It is 1974 and a tiny band of self-styled urban guerrillas, calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), abducts a newspaper heiress, who then takes the guerrilla name"Tania" and shocks the world by choosing to remain with her former captors. Soon most of the SLA are dead, killed in a suicidal confrontation with police in Los Angeles, forcing Tania and her two remaining comrades—the pompous and abusive General Teko and his duplicitous lieutenant, Yolanda—into hiding, where they will remain for the next sixteen months. These are the months of Tania's sentimental education.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312425319 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 04/18/2006 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 528 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.18(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Brooklyn, New YorkDate of Birth:
May 20, 1963Place of Birth:
New York, New YorkEducation:
Attended Hunter CollegeReading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
1. Trance opens with Tania watching a little boy tugging at his mother's hand, trying to get his mother to look at the strange woman (Tania) in the van. But the mother doesn't listen to her child. Consider the parents in this novel. What can you infer based on their relationships with their children, or how the children arrive at a revolutionary ideology, thanks to the education and lifestyle provided by their parents' wealth and values, only to reject those same wealth and values as evil? Later, it occurs to Hank Galton that "[t]here's something he was supposed to have done, to have been doing, something that had worked quietly day after day, all the years of his daughter's life, and one day it hadn't happened, had gone haywire like some humble cell inside the body that sets you up for disaster" (p. 209). What are your reactions to similar passages by Lydia Galton, Horward Rorvik, Susan Rorvik, and the Mocks?
2. Discuss Hank Galton's thrice-sung threnody in Interlude 1. He thinks he has seen his daughter burned to death on national television. Why does he learn the forensic details of death by fire? How does the reality of violent death compare to revolutionary rhetoric, which turns death into a glorious, romantic fulfillment? Based on Hank's reaction, what do you think his feelings as a parent are toward Alice? What about Hank Galton's grief does this passage capture? Would you react similarly? How would you describe the relationship that Hank Galton has with the Symbionese Liberation Army? Is he in any way a hostage? To whom?
3. Do you feel that Tania truly loves Cujo? Can true love be borne out of such extremity? In your opinion, what is it that Tania truly desires based on her actions throughout Trance? How does her character change in the course of the narrative? What does Tania's revolutionary conversion indicate about her nature? Compare Winston Smith's arrival at "love" for Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984 to Tania's feeling, at the end of Trance, of "the lure of another master viewpoint, the influence of another eager and unrelenting authority . . ." What comment, based on Tania's experience, is Christopher Sorrentino making about people and their relationship to authority?
4. Trance has been said to dismantle the mystique and celebrity around the Patty Hearst saga. How are some of the ways the novel achieves this? What does the author do to ground us in the everyday life of the SLA?
5. What can we glean from the SLA's relationship with Tania's celebrity when Guy Mock muses that "[T]he politics have to take a backseat to the show. . . . [T]hese guys' relationship to power is parasitic. Symbiotic, if you will, heh. What they really excel at is preempting the regularly scheduled programming" (p. 246-247). When Alice considers the films (she lists nine of them) she has seen that she feels are inspired by her story, to what extent is Mock's pronouncement fulfilled?
6. Trance approaches the recasting of one's identity as a fundamental American pursuit. What effect do the new names have on the SLA members and how does the redressing of one's self change one's identity? How does Tania feel about the SLA and her role in it? In what ways does she struggle with her sense of self? In Trance, many of the passages are of characters considering themselves, mulling over themselves, trying to affirm themselves, etc. What does this tendency of self-reflection say about both the SLA members and those characters outside the group? How do they feel about themselves? Consider Lydia Galton in light of these inquiries. Why does she dress in mourning? Do you get the sense that she knows who she is? How do you arrive at your conclusion?
7. Characterize the SLA. How does their desire to be Famous Revolutionaries clash with their mile-high rhetoric? How does the SLA struggle to express itself and continually invent and revise its own language?
8. Television is a subject discussed by nearly all of the characters in Trance—even the FBI calls prime-time TV "that Webster's of the everyday" (p. 269). Examine the passage on page 198 that begins, "Tania personally can't get enough TV." What do various characters in Trance say about TV? Do you feel that TV is an instance of "hamburger America" that retards the SLA's revolutionary goals? What effect does TV and cinema have on the characters in Trance, particularly the SLA members (for example, when Tania holds up a car, she realizes "[t]here's a High Noon aspect to this that doesn't escape her" [p. 7]). Do you agree with Tania when she thinks that the "whole country that she's planning to take over is right here in this box" (p. 82)? How right do you feel Lydia Galton is in thinking that though "these diversions [TV shows] provided an ‘escape' from the ‘perplexing' ‘reality' of a ‘turbulent' era, Lydia had little doubt that around the 1990s there would be a television comedy all about the trigger-happy days of the seventies" (p. 365)? What wider extrapolations can be made about our culture's tendency to create nostalgic fictions of by-gone eras? Do you consider it ironic that the SLA members watch the deaths of their comrades on television? Or when the FBI arrests Teko and Yolanda and discovers their final aliases on the mailing label for the TV Guide (p. 498)?
9. Could Trance be considered a guide of what not to do if you want to overthrow the government of the United States of America? Consider the enormousness of such an endeavor. If your reading group were a roving guerilla revolutionary unit, what roles would each of you play in the organization? Who would be responsible for expropriating monetary subsidies? What about the cold-cuts and three-bean salad?
10. How was the Symbionese Liberation Army regarded by other political entities at the time? What does the SLA's quest (and inability) to find black leadership indicate about their ideas of race and equality in America, and the public's reception of those ideas? What basis do they use to pick new leadership? How does Christopher Sorrentino play with this approach when the SLA continually solicits Joan Shimada for leadership? What reasons does Joan give for her not wanting to join?
11. Novelists like Jay Cantor (Great Neck), Russell Banks (The Darling), Neil Gordon (The Company You Keep), Don Silver (Backwards-Facing Man), Susan Choi (American Woman), Sigrid Nunez (The Last of Her Kind), and Dana Spiotta (Eat the Document) also have chosen in the last few years to write novels about American radicalism and domestic terrorism during the '60s and '70s. What about this historical period might engage a novelist's imagination? Why do you think this period is emerging now, fictionally? How relevant is the subject matter in light of our current national concerns regarding terrorism?
12. How would you describe the structure of the novel? Discuss the literary devices used in Trance, such as the headings and the interludes, the absence of conventional chapters, the shifts in verb tense, and the divisions marked by the seven-headed symbol of the SLA. How would you describe Christopher Sorrentino's narrative style? Does he sympathize with the characters? What effect does Sorrentino create by inhabiting so many characters' voices?