The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 August 2023
by Joshua Furst
Oh, look, it's the 1960s (and 70s) again!? OK boomer! Haven't we had enough of the Sixties by now? It's 2023, and we've got GenX, GenZ, Millennials, Alphas, whatnot. Shouldn't we care about what they want to do with the world? Well, we suppose so. But not all stories of the 60s are exhausted, yet. The great Sixties Novel hasn't yet been written, probably. But this is a good one, capturing the mercurial quality of the Revolution, and, most deeply and compellingly, the affects wrought on the people trapped in relationships with people driven to break the rules. In the late sixties, radical organizers Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were among the leaders who made a mess of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, notably nominating for President, Pigasus the Pig, on the Yippie Party ticket. It was, perhaps, the pinnacle in a long public circus of protest in the form of ridicule of the status quo. They were driven, hilarious, irreverent and dead serious about shattering a system rife with injustices. That our system remains rife with injustice tells you how much success the radicals of the 60s had, and, indeed, the inevitable arc of this novel.
Joshua Furst's novel makes no bones about what historical figure he is emulating in his radical leader Lenny Snyder. Abbie Hoffman was a trickster and was adept at drawing media attention for his antics. He and Jerry Rubin arrived to testify before Congress, dressed alternately as Central American guerillas and American founding fathers. The House Un-American Activities Committee was not impressed. This particular episode doesn't figure into this book, but other recognizable moments do. This is the chapter of Lenny's life (Abbie's life?) in which his son Freedom Snyder (Abbie's son America Hoffman?) comes into the world to witness and to be used by, Lenny's radical mission. The book is narrated conversationally by Freedom, who calls himself Fred now, looking back on what he remembers of Lenny's life and his own in those days during which the revolution faded into the sordid mess of New York in the 1970s.
The main takeaway here, though, is how beautifully written this book is. While we come for the radical Sixties, we stay for the emotionally complex and ultimately damaging relationship between father and son. Mother and son, too. Wrapped up in their youth and their revolutionary struggle, young Freedom is given a startling freedom to wander the streets of the Lower East Side at the age of five. While this reader found Fred perhaps a bit too precocious at that young age, we also recognize the gripping reality of being the offspring of upstart hippies. The self-absorption, the radical and ultimately wildly unrealistic dreams, the broken landscape of the post-radical era in which the revolutionaries either stick quixotically to the Dream or fall into the changing zeitgeist, in this case the money-grubbing 1980s and the deeply cynical decades that have followed.
Freedom has played his part. His image as a four-year-old chained to a tree to block the construction of a Colorado highway is sufficient for his participation in The Movement. His life is quieter now. An author can play this story in several ways. One can play up the naivité of the young 60s radicals. We can wax nostalgic for glory days (can't we all?). We can critique the failed critiques of the era. We can look back and grasp the hopes of that generation and cast it in contrast with the culture today. What failed, what was lost, what was gained and what, if anything, ever mattered? Furst gives us a thoughtful and engrossing fictional re-telling of a time and of the relationships that shape us. Highly recommended.
[Other books on the 60s & Counterculture]
See Also: [Growing (Up) at 37, by Jerry Rubin]