IF NOT THE WHOLE TRUTH

In Arbogast’s historical novel, a young woman takes a three-year journey through the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. 

It is September of 1969, and Connie Borders is angry. She had planned to attend Indiana University until, at the last minute, her father declared that he could not afford to send her to college. Now she is enrolled in a secretarial school. But Connie has California dreaming on her mind, idealizing a place where “hope, peace, and love thrived.” She leaves home and crashes at her friend’s IU off-campus apartment. At an anti-war gathering, Connie is convinced to join an upcoming protest in Chicago’s Old Town by Carlos, a Black university student of Puerto Rican heritage. He has a peace-loving demeanor, but he is also a complicated man with secrets, as Connie discovers when they become lovers. So begins her immersion into the already fractious anti-war movement, with its mosaic of competing agendas and clashing groups including the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, members of The Weatherman (later to become the Weather Underground), and more. In Chicago, she moves into a crash pad run by an activist known as Blue. A rally for “The Days of Rage” takes place a week later, and the turnout is less than hoped for. When Weathermen members show up carrying pipes and clubs, Connie comes face to face with the violent side of the forces roiling the country. Arbogast vividly brings readers directly into the gritty, drug-fueled realities of Connie’s three-year search for her own truth as she reckons with the diverse, often violent social battles of the time. In the novel’s introduction, Arbogast writes, “Much of this novel lives [in] a zone between history and fiction.” This is both the narrative’s strength and its weakness: Much of the historical background is presented in lengthy end-of-chapter footnotes, that, while compelling, interrupt the flow of the story.

Historically rich, with depressingly searing contemporary relevance.