MEXICAN SUNSET

A debut recollection of teenage existential angst and travel in the Age of Aquarius.

Jebb is the eldest of four children born during his parents’ six-year marriage. His artistic mother was born into privilege as the daughter of “Slim” Buehler, a Chicago meatpacking tycoon, and his father hailed from a well-off Buffalo family. The first crack in his idyllic façade came when his parents divorced, and his mother moved with the children to Hinsdale, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, to be close to her family. Jebb struggled in school, impeded by an undiagnosed learning disability, but after his mother married John, his new stepfather took the youngster under his wing, offering guidance, encouragement, and love. Then, in 1970, at the age of 38, John died. It was a crushing blow for the then-14-year-old author, sending him into emotional, psychological, and spiritual turmoil. The conflict between his extended family’s expectations for him, his own assumptions that he was destined for greatness, and his struggle to cope with loss marked the beginning of what he calls his five-year “Vision Quest,” a philosophical and psychological coming-of-age journey. He brings readers from the Midwest Plains to a Colorado boarding school to Mexico and back again—flying, driving, and hitchhiking back and forth across the continent, searching for a connection to nature, history, and God. Much of the memoir recounts his relationships with his maternal family elders and his mental meanderings, the latter often fueled by alcohol and drugs. Jebb offers passages in this book that are musically eloquent (“I had been born and bathed in the sunrise that spread across an artist colony on the Florida coast like an impressionist painting”), but they can also be verbose and repetitious. However, a riveting section near the end of the memoir describes his experience climbing Popocatepetl, an active volcano and Mexico’s second highest mountain. Here, Jebb augments his recitation of the physical exertions of his team of adventurers with a comprehensive running narrative detailing the disturbingly bloody history of the Aztecs.

An alternately compelling and exhausting remembrance.