Overview
As he did with In the Lake of the Woods, National Book Award winner Tim O'Brien strikes at the emotional nerve center of our lives with this ambitious, compassionate, and terrifically compelling new novel that tells the remarkable story of the generation molded and defined by the 1960s. At the thirtieth anniversary of Minnesota's Darton Hall College class of 1969, ten old friends reassemble for a July weekend of dancing, drinking, flirting, reminiscing, and regretting. The three decades since their graduation have seen marriage and divorce, children and careers, dreams deferred and disappointed-many memories and many ghosts. Together their individual stories create a portrait of a generation launched into adulthood at the moment when their country, too, lost its innocence. Imbued with his signature themes of passion, memory, and yearning, July, July is Tim O'Brien's most fully realized work.
Synopsis
As he did with In the Lake of the Woods, National Book Award winner Tim O'Brien strikes at the emotional nerve center of our lives with this ambitious, compassionate, and terrifically compelling new novel that tells the remarkable story of the generation molded and defined by the 1960s. At the thirtieth anniversary of Minnesota's Darton Hall College class of 1969, ten old friends reassemble for a July weekend of dancing, drinking, flirting, reminiscing, and regretting. The three decades since their graduation have seen marriage and divorce, children and careers, dreams deferred and disappointed-many memories and many ghosts. Together their individual stories create a portrait of a generation launched into adulthood at the moment when their country, too, lost its innocence. Imbued with his signature themes of passion, memory, and yearning, July, July is Tim O'Brien's most fully realized work.
Book Magazine
If you believe that college was the best—or at least the most important—time of your life, this novel is for you. Set in 2000, the date of the thirty-year reunion of Darnton Hall College's class of 1969, the novel uses the promise of the late '60s to explain the sorrows of its middle-aged protagonists. Each chapter focuses on one of a dozen or so characters, showing us a pivotal decision, a road not taken, a promise broken or fulfilled. Following the intertwined lives of a large cast of characters as they negotiate the meaningless present and the golden past gives O'Brien room to develop a complex narrative, but at the end of the day, it's not easy to sympathize with (or care much about) these people. Virtually indistinguishable from one another in their resentments and regrets, they bear witness to the narcissism of the baby boomer generation and the emptiness of its version of success.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewIn his National Book Awardwinning Going After Cacciato and his exquisite collection of linked stories, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien proved to be one of the most eloquent, original chroniclers of the Vietnam War. In July, July he broadens his approach, dramatizing both the war itself and the larger social history of the generation that came of age in that turbulent era.
Set at a Minnesota college, the novel follows a group of 1969 graduates during their wild, weekend-long 30th reunion as they reveal their hopes, memories, failures, and aspirations. Highlights include a former baseball star who lost his leg on the banks of the Song Tra Ky river; a Presbyterian minister removed from her pulpit under scandalous circumstances; a militant idealist who burned his draft card and moved to Winnipeg; a "well married woman" who shares her life with two husbands and an occasional boyfriend; and an ailing, overweight broom-and-mop manufacturer who briefly impersonated a reclusive, Pynchon-like novelist named Thomas Pierce. In lesser hands, this approach could have resulted in a by-the-numbers rehash of The Big Chill. Instead, O'Brien's humor, empathy, and bone-deep understanding of these lost, deeply confused men and women light up the novel, revealing him to be a master storyteller at the absolute top of his form.
July, July is an essentially realistic novel interrupted occasionally by otherworldly flourishes: oracular voices that may or may not have psychological origins. These voices speak to various characters about their (usually) grim futures, granting them glimpses of "the appalling drift of things to come." The result of this unique commingling of the banal and the miraculous, the tragic and the trivial, is a deeply involving, strikingly original novel in a class by itself -- easily one of the literary high points of 2002. Bill Sheehan