Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

Racine's engaging debut is a generation gap pas de trois, focusing on Janelle and Tom, who are coping with their son's imminent departure for college. This event proves to be a traumatic catalyst for Janelle's panicky reassessment of how she and Tom have lived their lives. There was a time when they were nomadic hippies and everything they owned fit into a steamer trunk. Now, a quarter of a century later, Tom has a career in computers and Janelle fears their complacent comfort and dependence upon technology. When Angel, a charismatic revolutionary and former lover of Janelle's from the good-and-stoned days, calls and invites himself over for a visit, Janelle worries about how their lives will look to him. Racine's patchouli-scented homage to the generation of 1960s activists who find themselves mired in the mega-corporate world of the 1990s where the teenagers say things like ""Your mom, man, she's a throwback"" is a charming m lange of nostalgic idealism and humorous realism, wryly acknowledging the ""aggressively bad folk music"" that came with the good. Racine truthfully captures the irony that the most exaggeratedly mellow types--e.g., Janelle--are frequently the biggest control freaks through amusingly patronizing and jaunty banter between Janelle and her MTV-weaned son. The novel's primary flaw is a superfluous metaphor involving a flood that courses through the narrative: the turbulent waters creeping up on the family's rural Georgia home echo the rising emotions within. But that's a minor shortcoming in what is otherwise an enjoyable and insightful work that affectionately skewers '60s idealism while honoring the good intentions of those boomers who courted revolution and wound up puzzled citizens adjusting to middle age. (May)