Trance, Christopher Sorrentino’s second novel, is a masterful work of balance and insight. It follows the wanderings of the Symbionese Liberation Army and their heiress captive, Alice Girton, whose plight echoes that of Patty Hearst. Wonderfully, the plot – full of big guns, random shootings, the media’s insatiable appetite and the passionate rhetoric of revolution – does not overshadow the core of the novel. The story’s lifeblood, surprisingly, is not the dramatic elements, such as the invasion of civilian houses or the kidnapping of strangers for the use of their cars. Rather, the richness and intensity lives in the interiority of people on every side of catastrophe.

Willie Wolfe, renamed “Cujo” when he joins the SLA, muses over the incongruence of his life as a radical: “[…] A knock at the door [was a] pretty odd thing to be happening at a secret hideout, thought Cujo, as he came awake. The phrase, secret hideout, just appeared in his thoughts from out of the past, the days when he was Willie Wolfe; from out of backyard strands of elms and sycamores and maples and other craggy trees of the Northeast […] heading for some crude structure of plywood and two-by-fours…” (pp 15-16). This meditation on childhood is fitting, as Sorrentino exposes the naïveté and haplessness with which the SLA forges their revolution. Male leaders, driven by tempers, ego, testosterone and fear, lead their followers into unlikely places. Teko brings his wife and Alice, renamed “Tania,” to the Cosmic Age hotel outside Disneyland, where they drink wine and watch television until the death of their friends dominates the screen. Cinque invades the home of Shelia Mears, a woman who “never had a white person in her house before” (59), with a large group of white people struggling to be comfortable. The SLA creates a dazzling amalgam of illogic and childishness, and with Sorrentino’s attention to detail, the reader cannot dare to look away.

Sorrentino refuses to neglect in his novel; he gives the perspectives of waitresses and passersby who appear a single time. There are moments when the reader begins to lose interest – “Hacksaw” has three sections, each of which is about Yolanda’s attempt to purchase a hacksaw; as expected, she is met with masculine derision, and the narrative could have spent its time in more vivid territory. Much more interesting is the unexpected minds the author explores, such as the Girtons at home, uncertain about Alice’s whereabouts. He shows Alice, at times a dedicated SLA member, permitting herself to return to a mindset that is deeply elitist, privileged, and unapologetic. Sorrentino forgets no one – the reader wanders through a multitude of perspectives, and the only reason one is willing to leave them is the freshness of the next voice.