As a longtime fan of judging books by their covers, I was thrilled to spot a copy of Brian Joseph Davis’s I, Tania on the shelf at my local independent bookstore. The book, featuring a rendition of the famous agitprop image of a rifle-toting Patty Hearst, promised on the back cover to be “the highly fictionalized true story of the rise and fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), as it never happened.” It looked like a little pop, a little punk and a whole lot of fun. Looks can be deceiving.
The SLA, a self-styled urban guerrilla outfit, fought for the liberation of Symbia, a country that never existed outside of the imaginations of a handful of left-wing lunatics. Though they carried out a couple of bank robberies and murders in the early ’70s, the group remains best known for the abduction and re-education of 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who eventually denounced her parents and fought alongside the SLA under the nom de guerre Tania.
After her capture, Hearst abandoned militant activism for the life of a wealthy socialite. What this book presupposes is… maybe she didn’t.
The first half of this book is ostensibly the autobiography of a woman who, despite spending her days in “fascist pumps and pig lipstick,” remains an unrepentant class warrior. As Tania reveals how she became the de facto leader of the SLA we are introduced to the members of the army. Instead of seizing this opportunity to create memorable characters and satirize a self-important group of so-called radicals, Davis prefers his own cleverness to a cohesive narrative and subjects the reader to an endless barrage of throwaway jokes and literary trickery. While it is somewhat funny to imagine Karl Marx delivering his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 at the Hammersmith Odeon in full-on rock star mode, a four-page description of the event is unnecessary. Sadly, this digression is altogether too representative of an approach to storytelling that undervalues logic and coherence.
Perhaps the rejection of a conventional narrative is a nod to the revolutionary nature of the SLA, but it doesn’t serve the story and makes for a disorienting and ultimately disappointing read. It is a shame that Davis is not more interested in making his work accessible to a wider audience, as he is clearly a very smart and funny man. One of the interpolated pieces that pepper the book is “It Takes a Bear to Defeat a Pig: A People’s Review of the Bad News Bears.” Starting with the conceit that the name “Bears” is “a less than subtle nod to Soviet symbolism,” the sustained radical reading of the Walter Matthau film is the funniest piece of writing I’ve come across all year. It demonstrates what Davis is capable of when he focuses on subverting conventions instead of rejecting them.
