Thirty-one years after the summer of '69, the graduates of Darton Hall College reunite to drink, dance, flirt, dream, confess, and confront a world dramatically different from what they had once imagined.
In July, July, Tim O’Brien, America's master storyteller of the Vietnam experience, turns his acute sensibility to new territory. Having expertly chronicled the life of soldiers in-country and veterans haunted by their memories, O'Brien expands his signature theme to encompass an entire generation. "The impacts of the American war in Vietnam," O'Brien notes, "were felt not only by those who served in the military but by those at home. For every man who went to war, there were sisters, girlfriends, wives, and mothers who paid their own heavy price."
In prose that is at once humorous and heart-wrenching, O'Brien explores the lives of the former students of Darton Hall College, gathered together under cardboard stars in a gymnasium in the heat of a July 2000 weekend. We meet Billy McMann, a draft dodger whose life in Canada has fallen apart because of his love — and subsequent hatred — for Dorothy Stier. Dorothy, a well-off Reagan Republican, is still recovering from the cancer that claimed her left breast and from her decision to let Billy go to Winnipeg alone. Friends Jan Huebner and Amy Robinson down a pilfered bottle of vodka while commiserating about divorce, their moribund sex lives, and their generation's lost innocence. The sexpot Spook Spinelli, unsatisfied with two husbands and two households, tests her fading charms on Marv Bertel, an overweight mop and broom magnate with a large but failing heart. Equally memorable are David Todd, a vet who lost a leg and a measure of his sanity alongside a river in Vietnam; Paulette Haslo, a defrocked minister; Marla Dempsey, a woman unable or too afraid to love; Ellie Abbott, a wife racked with guilt; and Karen Burns and Harmon Osterberg, two classmates whose recent deaths hover over the reunion.
Revisiting a long-vanished era, these sharply drawn and unforgettable characters struggle with the surprising paths their lives have taken over the past three decades. Thrust together, they find that their emotions are as confused and complicated now as when they were younger. Their combined stories, sometimes painful, sometimes delightful, leave the reader both moved and spellbound by the indomitable power of the human spirit to renew itself and to endure.
Yet beyond simply presenting the lives of memorable characters, July, July deftly examines a generation that set out in turbulent times to change the world but, older and scarred, must reconcile itself to a mundane and sometimes terrifying reality. "Thirty-one years ago," O'Brien writes, "in the brutal spring of 1969, Amy Robinson and many others had lived beyond themselves, elevated by the times. There was good and evil. There was moral heat. But this was the year 2000, a new millennium, congeniality in public places, hope gone stale, morons become millionaires, and the gossip was about Ellie Abbott's depression, Dorothy Stier's breast cancer, Spook Spinelli's successful double marriage and the fact that she seemed to be going for a triple that evening with either Marv Bertel or Billy McMann."
Entertaining, ambitious, tender, and insightful, July, July is a masterful exploration of the conflicting forces — idealism and resignation, love and loss, aging and regeneration — unleashed on a generation of men and women still living with the heartache of the Vietnam War.
Tim O'Brien received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction for Going After Cacciato. His novel The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize, and was chosen as one of the best books of 1990 by the New York Times Book Review. In the Lake of the Woods was named the best work of fiction in 1994 by Time and selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year. It also won the 1995 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, and, along with Tomcat in Love, O'Brien's most recent novel, was a national bestseller.
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