Revolutionaries

This roman à clef from Furst (The Sabotage Café) about America’s 1960s protest era and the speed with which its leaders and their causes slipped into obsolescence is a heartfelt meditation on how quickly history outruns political and social ideals. Its principal character is Lenny Snyder, a counterculture gadfly whose personality echoes Abbie Hoffman and whose outrageous activist antics, related in the whirlwind opening chapters, comprise a potted history of the era’s most famous social justice protests. The novel’s narrator is Lenny’s son, Freedom, aka Freddy, whom Lenny sometimes used as a “tyke revolutionary” prop in his protests. Freddy is just seven when Lenny, facing a drug rap, disappears, and most of the story follows Freddy and his mother, Suzy, as they try to adjust to a world that has moved on without them and Lenny, often in the company of the poignantly depicted real-life folksinger Phil Ochs, whose decline and suicide in the 1970s make him one of the era’s most tragic casualties. Furst modulates movingly between Freddy’s childhood memories of the father whom he admired and his adult perspective on how cruel and selfishly opportunistic Lenny could be. Furst’s novel and its themes will resonate with readers regardless of whether they lived through its times. (Apr.)