REVOLUTION

The third installment in a series of historical novels covering the last 70 years of American history.

In Bond’s latest volume, the narrative moves into the incredibly turbulent late 1960s, dramatizing a tight progression of well-known social and political events: riots in Paris, the Woodstock music festival, civil rights marches, the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Robert Kennedy, and, looming over everything, the war in Vietnam. The four central characters of the series—Troy Barden, who’s drafted and shipped off to Southeast Asia; Tara O’Brien, a drug-addicted rock star; Daisy Moran, a student of philosophy at Stanford University; and Mick O’Brien, Tara’s brother and a former football hero who comes to protest the seemingly endless Vietnam conflict—work their ways through the signature crises of the time. Troy, for instance, is embroiled in the Tet Offensive as the story opens (“Gasping, screaming, dazed, breathless, heart pounding with fear and danger, Troy tried to see everywhere as he was running, crouching, crawling, rolled on his back to change clips and ran forward, firing again”), while Tara prays for his safety back at home. Mick is rustling up votes for Kennedy, a candidate whom he idolizes, characterizing him as “a mind so fierce and bright it encompassed almost everything.” Bond handles these and all the other plot threads with skill and confidence even if the work as a whole lacks a clear feeling of narrative momentum. In particular, he has an ear for capturing pitch-perfect dialogue that suits the setting: “Hash makes you see clearly,” one character opines. “But the State doesn’t want you to see clearly.” Another character drolly comments on the Paris student riots: “France, you must remember, is a fashionable woman. She likes a fling now and again, something that gets her blood hot for a few weeks.”

An evocative novel of the 1960s that hits just the right tone.