The Year That Trembled
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Both a love story and a wartime chronicle, this powerful novel reveals the effects of the Vietnam War on a group of friends living in a small town in Ohio. As the 1970 draft lottery nears, the young men must examine their views of war and consider the fate that awaits them; the young women face the possibility of losing their husbands, boyfriends, and friends. Each member of the group embarks on a personal search that will bring very real and very adult conflict and pain and strip away their youthful naiveté. The enormity of this war contrasted with the microcosm of one small town exposes the ambivalence of characters who are at war with themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's 1970. Casey Pedersen and three fellow recent high-school grads have managed to carve out a separate peace for themselves in an Ohio farmhouse called Little Meadow. Phil is the musician, Hairball is the partyer, Jeff is into Buddhist chanting and Casey is the group diarist. As Vietnam looms, however, the Selective Service lottery shatters their haven of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and introspection. What distinguishes Lax's occasionally sappy debut is the sense of impending doom that afflicts his four young men and their next-door neighbors: slightly older Charlie and his supercool wife, Helen, the object of just about everyone's desires. If Casey's philosophical meanderings smack of self-indulgence, the occasional trite metaphor rears its ugly head and the odd anachronism (Keith Moon was not dead yet in 1970) is allowed to slip by, Lax ably depicts the randomness of the draft and mimics the familiar rhetoric of innocence that we associate with the Age of Aquarius, when "we listened more to new ideas, however sentimental or foolish they sound all these years later in the harsh light of the millennium's end."
