THE LOVE YOU TAKE

In Wilson’s novel, an American baby boomer seeks romantic fulfillment over the course of the 1970s.

As the author puts it, “Because Andrew Watson was a child in the Sixties he could not be a child of them.” Luckily for Andy, the 1970s were right around the corner. Following the tragic killings of student protestors at Kent State by the National Guard, Andy gets to participate in a campus-wide strike at his own Concordia College, a political rite of passage that has the side benefit of introducing him to the sexually liberated Susanna Agincourt, one of the few girls on the all-male school’s campus. Both the strike and their love affair come to an end, however, and five years later Andy finds himself not-quite-happily married to his high school sweetheart, Shelley, working as a newspaper reporter in Charlottesville, Virginia, and wondering just where the revolution went. After a brush with death—or at least castration—while snorkeling in Key West, Andy quits his job to attend grad school, waiting tables three nights a week and puzzling over his future. Into this time of uncertainty strolls Susanna Agincourt once again. Can Andy recapture a bit of that 1960s revolutionary spirit, or is he doomed to blow up his life with a thoroughly 1970s concoction of hedonism, cynicism, and malaise? Wilson effectively weaves the generational concerns of the baby boomers through Andy’s journey, which stretches all the way to John Lennon’s assassination in 1980. “The word revolution felt a little grandiose and a little silly by now,” Wilson writes, “but the beliefs it represented, if you were young and American and…lacked any significant form of oppression to rebel against in a world filled with the real thing, those beliefs, whatever they were, still mattered to people like Andy.” The plot is highly episodic, and some characters strain credulity—Susanna in particular never feels entirely real. Even so, Wilson manages to capture both the alienation and narcissism of the era.

A meandering but often insightful novel about love and aging.