The SLA's Tania, reconstituted with suspense and clarity

Trance
By Christopher Sorrentino
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 516 pp., $26

Christopher Sorrentino did not pick the ideal time to publish a book about home-grown terrorists made famous by surveillance cameras. Still, it would be a shame if the recent bombings in London steered people away from his bold second novel, ''Trance," one of this year's most surprising works of fiction. By turns indulgent and amazing, it follows a fictionalized Patty Hearst through two years of involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Back in the early 1970s, the SLA was a more hard-core but less thoughtful Weather Underground. It announced its appearance to the world in a ''communique," claiming to have assassinated the superintendent of Oakland, Calif., schools for supporting a law requiring students to carry ID cards. It then adopted an ex-convict as its leader.

The group might have gone gently into that good night of American amnesia were it not for the fact that in February 1974 it kidnapped Hearst from her Berkeley apartment, brainwashed her, and, after stashing her in a closet for several weeks, unleashed her back into the public eye, renamed ''Tania." The photograph of her posing with a machine gun during a bank robbery in San Francisco is famous the world round.

In ''Trance," Sorrentino allows Hearst the nom de guerre of Tania but changes her ''real" name to Alice Galton. Her compatriots, however, get to keep their own real names. This does not seem like an accidental detail, for although Hearst-Galton is the character who makes this book notable, it is the people around her who make it feel, well, like fiction. Their fears and petty insecurities and lame desires to transcend their bourgeois backgrounds would be almost touching, were they not also so creepily self-involved.

Hearst-Galton, however, begins as an icon, and only after 500 pages of marinating with characters who are not icons does she begin to seem three-dimensional. In the beginning sequence, as she and her comrades scram after an attempted robbery, there is something phony and a little weird about her flipping up her sunglasses to reveal her famous face to plebes on the street. Somehow, what might work on camera feels smuggled into a novel under false pretenses.

But that, in a way, might be one of Sorrentino's points. ''Trance" is a novel that peels back the veneer of celluloid looking for the real thing, only to find a homemade movie there. The SLA's flight to the woods of Pennsylvania after a shoot-out with the Los Angeles Police Department kills six of its members could not have been better scripted by Hollywood. There were two bickering revolutionaries, a loaded newspaper heiress, and a lot of media coverage. What exactly their mayhem meant, well, that's another thing. As Sorrentino depicts it here, even Tania and her compatriots don't know what they stand for.

In the past 10 years, Sorrentino has become something of an expert in capturing the ecstatic emptiness of what passes as hip. His superb debut novel, ''Sound on Sound," was structured as a rock 'n' roll recording session. He has retooled and nerved up his prose for this thriller of sorts. If the opening sequence were shot for film, it would be done with hand-held cameras and a grainy filter. Dialogue stops abruptly or sometimes trails off mid-sentence. The reader struggles to keep pace, as if eavesdropping, not participating.

Occasionally, Sorrentino cuts us some slack by zeroing in on some detail and describing it to a state of sublime clarity. When a car becomes a hide-out for too long, he describes it as follows:

''Guy is silent and fretful throughout the drive, gnawing his nails; the car has become a familiar enough space to them that Randi believes they have divined a way, sitting side by side for hours and days on end, to be apart from each other. And so they sometimes ride, hushed and remote, as if in separate rooms."

This is a long book, and Sorrentino manages to unspool most of it in this almost unbearably present-tense fashion. As in E. L. Doctorow's ''The Book of Daniel," context vibrates out of the sentences, rather than being foisted on the action from above. Most of the novel concerns Tania's run from the law.

As the consequences for Tania and everyone else involved increase, the stupidity of the SLA members' double-speak becomes more and more painfully ironic. They wanted to liberate her from the ''fascist insect" that preyed on people, but in nabbing Hearst-Galton they handed newspapers one of the juiciest stories of the mid-1970s. While their purpose was to bring a symbiosis back into life, all they actually provided was rupture.

Sorrentino marshals these observations into action without us really noticing, often keeping us occupied with ''Trance" 's vivid emotional thread. We lose something essential when an event becomes a media story, this book suggests. We become hypnotized and detached. It takes novels like this one to bring us back to the moment, to return our icons to us as flesh and blood, almost.

John Freeman is a writer in New York.