July, July

Tim O'Brien's novel is about a diverse group of college students from the radical days of the late 1960s brought together again 31 years later for a class of '69 reunion. They drink, reminisce, lust, drink some more, laugh and cry. There's a core cast of caricatures (not characters), a war vet minus a leg, a jilted draft dodger, a law breaking hippie minister, a lonely, yearning fat guy, a suicidal floozy, an uptight Republican minus a breast, a depressed adulteress, a couple of bitter divorcees (who consume staggering amounts of vodka) and a woman who feels herself to be incapable of love, all of whom have deep dark secrets and all deeply wounded in some way. I wonder if my 30 year reunion would have yielded so much dramatic fodder. I'll never know. What I do know is that friends from one's youth are one's best friends like it or not. On the rare occasion I meet up with someone from my distant past it is as if no time has elapsed at all since we were together. These folks are thrown into an emotional maelstrom and meet it head on. They party like it's 1969. They carouse like there's no tomorrow and when tomorrow inevitably comes it's a letdown. Not a great book like O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (in fact there are some distinctly cringe inducing passages) but an amusing read for someone like me who experienced the turbulent and liberating late 60's and early 70's.