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| The
Downtown Writers Network is a resource for independent writers in central
Ohio. |
A Novel of the
60's A Review by Douglas Gray One of the classic posters from the late 1960's featured a group of a half dozen or so hippies standing by the side of a road -- young women and men in jeans, tie-dyed t-shirts, headbands, fringed jackets, and soiled capes. Underneath the group portrait ran the caption, "We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us About." You felt that you knew these people as soon as you saw them: restless youths of a discontented generation who have come together in a makeshift family of passionate, conflicted relationships. It's hard to find a convincing novel about hippies and the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era. Most fiction either romanticizes or patronizes them, and misses the essential spirit of the times, which was perfectly expressed in that poster. What I remember most vividly about the 1960's are the strong but often destructive bonds of friendship that brought the activists together, and a comic sense of rebellion that could suddenly turn tragic. Sandra Gurvis' new novel, The Pipe Dreamers, is one of the few novels I know of that captures the dual spirit of those times and portrays it realistically. Set at Hayes University (which is a fictional but recognizable Ohio college around the time of the Kent State disaster), The Pipe Dreamers concerns a coterie of student activists, a band of friends and lovers who are bound in a mysterious pact. Their quixotic mission to end the war in Vietnam begins with a youthful idealism that sours into political and sexual intrigues, culminating in an inevitable catastrophe. At the heart of the story is Julia Brandon, a naive sorority girl from Bexley who is drawn into the orbit of this group but never truly belongs to it, even when she finds herself embroiled in its plots. Like Mary Ann Singleton in Armistad Maupin's Tales of the City, Julia is the outsider and the quintessential innocent whose education into life's most perplexing truths forms the central plot of the novel. The antiwar activists who surround her are drawn from recognizable characters of the era, but Gurvis manages to provide each one with a marked individuality through their relationship to Julia. They include a war-weary Vietnam veteran who acts as the leader of the campus protest movement; two radicals with violent agendas and sinister methods of funding them; an early feminist whose sexuality is her greatest vulnerability; and a handsome young man, the paragon of the group, who seems to have more shimmer than substance. All of their lives are changed by a shocking disaster on that spring day in 1970 when a sense of innocence died for an entire generation across the nation. The novel doesn't end with it, though. The final fourth of The Pipe Dreamers follows them after that event, as they scatter to different parts of the world and struggle throughout their adulthood to make sense of what happened to them back at Hayes University. Gurvis doesn't provide a sentimental denouement to their story. Though there are a few reconciliations in the closing chapters among the surviving characters, they all continue to grieve over wounds to relationships that will never heal. Anyone who remembers the 1960s will appreciate The Pipe Dreamers for its glimpse into the past. Anyone who wasn't around at the time should read it for its honest and accurate portrayal of a time that's been widely misunderstood. Columbus writer Sandra Gurvis is also the author of Day Trips from Columbus, The Well-Traveled Dog, Careers for Noncomformits and America's Strangest Museums. She is at work on a Where Have all the Flower Children Gone?, a nonfiction book on the antiwar movement. |
The Pipe Dreamers