THE DEBUTANTE (AND THE BOMB FACTORY)

A hapless informant-turned-professor dives into the past in search of a woman he once loved in Canter’s comic novel.

Lincoln “Linc” Cox was a freshman in college when he met high school senior Samantha Victor at a debutante cotillion. Samantha was one of the debs—the daughter of a wealthy banker and a prominent socialite, and hardly the sort of girl he’d expect to get caught up in the radical politics of the late 1960s. Their relationship was brief and ended before Samantha joined the militant Weather Underground, though Linc covered the 1969 Days of Rage demonstration in Chicago as a reporter and witnessed Samantha’s participation in it from a distance. Forty years later, Linc is a divorced college professor writing a book on the Weathermen and hunting down old members, partially in the hope of reconnecting with Samantha. One major complication: Linc became a state informant on the Weathermen not long after the Days of Rage—and has remained one for the past four decades. Only recently did he learn, during an attempt to interview an ex-member of the group, that he has a reputation for being a rat. As he attempts to locate Samantha, fallout from events from the past—including the famous Greenwich Village townhouse explosion—reemerge to threaten to upend his present. Canter’s prose is smooth and often funny, presenting Linc’s self-deprecating account of his hapless adventures in a nebulous world of espionage and terrorism. Here, for instance, he describes his time confined in an American safe house in England in the 1970s: “They trained spies, and from time to time I was used as a guinea pig by female spies in training. Their job was to make me think they liked me….They didn’t tell me that.” Although the premise seems a bit contrived at first, the plot grows increasingly intricate and surprising, and readers will quickly find themselves caught up in the intrigue of it all. Canter hews fairly closely to historical fact, up to a point, and manages to turn this peculiar piece of 1960s lore into a witty, immersive read.

A short and insightful novel of an aging hippie generation.