SHE WAS
Janis Hallowell
William Morrow
Fiction
ISBN: 9780061243257

Doreen Woods is a law-abiding citizen, community member, wife, mother, and a successful dentist with her own practice and an offshoot that provides dental care for people with minimal financial resources. Her son is grown, about to start college in the fall, and her marriage is at a good and solid place. Although her brother is suffering from AIDS-related MS, there is only one big thing keeping her from being completely content with her place on the earth.

Years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, Doreen was an 18-year-old terrorist named Lucy Johansson, and is wanted by the FBI for killing a man during a Columbia University bombing manuever that went wrong. For over 30 years, she has moved quickly and quietly through her life without raising suspicions, but the sudden reappearance of an old comrade has her frightened for her life.

SHE WAS by Janis Hallowell is a first-rate thriller disguised as literary fiction. The ongoing chase, during which the present-day state of events in Doreen's life speed up and become more and more intense as the pages turn, has a feeling of complete and utter terror to it. Doreen is the hunted, and the fact that we've met her at a place where her life is happy and moving along without much outward care makes the disintegrating state of her affairs that much more volatile. Like Jason Bourne, she is moving as fast as she can to keep away from the past nipping angrily at her heels. But the faster she runs, the faster the past seems to catch up with her.

In a fury of activity over a few days, Doreen loses her father, admits her secret identity and past to her clueless husband and son, and causes a very dramatic turn in the dwindling life of her brother. Having helped her into hiding after the bombing, her brother is wanted as well, but it is his pain-addled body that is the most aggregious affront to his sensibilities. Neither of them care for the politics of old, and although they have lived through some politically hypocritical times (Adam, the brother, came of age in the gay ’70s and ’80s as well), their former selves are just that --- former. In post 9/11 America, however, terrorism is terrorism, and everybody is suspect, especially someone who participated in the radical movement so completely.

Hallowell writes with the pinched and efficient verbiage of a suspense hound. The flashbacks to Doreen's former life as a revolutionary and Adam's former life living with a Klaus Nomi-type gay club superstar, as well as his wrenching time spent in service in Vietnam, are poignant but informative --- a straightforward narrative that really does inform and build the characters as we read. You can almost see them like a 4-D computer graphic --- one side is clear, then another, until there is a multidimensional human being beamed into your head as you read. Hallowell manages to put just enough historical context into the book so that younger readers who may not remember these types of inciting incidents, like the Columbia uprising or the Vietnam War, will still feel the sting of the violence, political vitriol and community clashing that comes in wartime (much like today).

It is particularly remarkable that, with such heated backdrops, Hallowell is able to reign herself in and not go overboard in comparing the guerilla tactics of police during the ’60s and ’70s with the incendiary and insidious tactics of today's conservative government. Reading about incidents like a Berkley rally and a trip through Alabama during the Woolworth sit-ins in the ’60s, we see, through Doreen’s and Adam's eyes, the kind of violent behavior that sparked the sort of radical activity that Doreen found herself involved in. Through her son, Hallowell gets in some appropriate punches for the current paranoid sweep of young men and women of color and different cultures that 9/11 has wrought upon our civilization.

SHE WAS is a great book --- written with restrained intensity and emotional vibrancy, with a respect for the past and a thinly-but-nicely veiled warning to all of us that the past is always with us and the future is nothing without it.

    --- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

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