Description

This is the story of a group of young and not-so-young people living within reach of the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1980s. There is John, a successful young executive in Silicon Valley who is unaccountably lonely his loyal ex-girlfriend Janet, a sculptor and drummer in the band Liquid Sheep, who places an ad in the personal columns on his behalf Liz, the young lawyer whom This is the story of a group of young and not-so-young people living within reach of the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1980s. There is John, a successful young executive in Silicon Valley who is unaccountably lonely his loyal ex-girlfriend Janet, a sculptor and drummer in the band Liquid Sheep, who places an ad in the personal columns on his behalf Liz, the young lawyer whom he meets as a result of the ad Liz’s family, especially her brother Ed, who has trouble finding his direction in life and her cat Charlemagne, who is perfectly certain of his. There is also Phil, John’s friend, who has left his job in Silicon Valley for reasons of conscience and been in turn left by his wife, who has gone back east. It is not simply a California story, although certain details about wine-making, pet iguanas, olive-picking, astonishing billboards and bumper stickers—“Have you hugged your whale today”—capture the seductiveness of the West Coast at the same time that they illuminate the larger world in which we live. Above all, this is a book about the universal pursuit of love—love that’s over and done with, love that persists, and love that hasn’t yet been tried. As we read, we find that we care more than we had realized about such things as loneliness, babies, celibacy, music, boys with boys and boys with girls, even the wisdom of writing a whole novel in verse. When we come to the end, we begin rereading, this time to enjoy the rhymes. Perhaps this is the perfect book for the 1980s—fluid, funny, poignant, quotable, resting every fourteen lines, a tour de force that is also a tour of everything that concerns us.