Any Day Now

Starred review from January 16, 2012
Locus magazine columnist Bisson pays homage to the beat poets as he embraces the social atmosphere of the late ’60s and early ’70s in staccato, pared-down prose that suits the novel’s coming-of-age narrative. Clay is born to moderately progressive parents in the conservative Kentucky town of Owensboro. As a young college dropout and malcontent, he heads to New York and finds himself on the periphery of the radical left. After becoming linked to the extremist Weathermen just as they bomb a New York City building, Clay flees to New Mexico and settles in a makeshift hippie commune beneath a geodesic dome. As a character, Clay is a beautifully drawn emblem for the identity crisis playing itself out in America then: at once an unassuming mechanic who embodies smalltown American values and an idealistic beat poet who has rejected mainstream society. Snippets of the outside world come to us as they do to Clay, through letters from his mother and occasional newspapers that paint a picture of an inhospitable and treacherous period of American history. Bisson shows true finesse in capturing the mood of a generation. Though shy of 300 pages, the novel feels epic. Agent: John Silbersack, Trident Media Group.

February 1, 2012
Kentuckian Clay Bauer moves from an early infatuation with Beat poetry to radicalism in this coming-of-age novel set in the 1950s and '60s. When you're interested in the writings Kerouac and Ginsberg--and the cool jazz of Brubeck and Jamal--but are growing up in Owensboro, Ky., life can be tough, for you're bound to be out-of-sync with the prevailing cultural norms. Clay's mother intends for him to go to Vanderbilt, but he never quite gets around to applying, so toward the end of the summer after his high-school graduation he hastily enrolls at Gideon, a small liberal-arts college in Minnesota. There he finds a few more simpatico friends than he had in Owensboro, but eventually even college feels confining, so Clay packs up for New York City, a place more congenial to his spirit. (He likes finding John Coltrane rather than Marty Robbins on the jukebox.) He digs life there (yes, he uses language like that) and hooks up with Mary Claire (aka EmCee), whose radicalism leads to her death as she's making bombs in her upscale townhome. The explosion puts Clay at risk as well, so he goes on the lam to a commune in Colorado, where the inhabitants labor to make a geodesic dome. Although Bisson takes us through the political developments of the time period, he also creates a weird alternate history--in which Hubert Humphrey becomes president and Martin Luther King is thwarted from becoming vice-president--as a backdrop to the action of Clay and his countercultural cohorts. Bisson builds his story up in relatively small chunks of prose, and while we don't lose the narrative thread, after a while the technique becomes tedious.

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January 1, 2012

This excellent novel is a poignant fictional recollection of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s that gradually veers, with the help of psychoactive drugs and political activism, into a kind of postapocalyptic survival story. In Owensboro, KY, where avid reader Clay grows up, social and racial hierarchies are very much in place. In his teens, Clay becomes interested in writing poetry and is attracted to the Beat movement, represented locally by a charismatic dropout who calls himself Roads. After a brief stop at a small Midwestern college, Clay ends up in Sixties New York City, where he meets a rich girl involved in radical politics and communal living. She vanishes after her house blows up, and the police begin following Clay, forcing him to take off for a commune in the West that becomes increasingly authoritarian. VERDICT The author, a writer of (probably under-appreciated) sf and fantasy novels, here deftly resurrects Sixties America. As history is gradually subverted and chronology reshuffled, the reader is slightly jarred and then fascinated by the dramatic world presented. Highly recommended for its literary quality and creativity of vision.--Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2012
Hugo and Nebula Award winner Bisson reimagines the radical 1960s in this deeply personal portrait of a man and a country. Clay grows up in a small town in Kentucky, ever curious about the wider world. An ace mechanic and a jazz lover, he is drawn to outsiders, but his affection for a privileged radical activist in New York City ends tragically when she is killed while making a bomb. This compels him to seek out an isolated Drop Citylike commune out west, where old friends and new ones reside in a geodesic dome. Robert Kennedy has survived an assassination attempt and chosen Martin Luther King Jr. as his running mate, but their election spurs civil unrest as the troops in Vietnam rebel, and the country is consumed by strife, pitting neighbor against neighbor. When serious trouble visits the commune, Clay soldiers on, despite his disillusionment. In this unsettling but always interesting alternate-history novel, which offers much subversive commentary on contemporary society, Bisson's jazzlike prose summons a utopia whose adherents seek personal freedom only to find that their basic civil liberties can vanish in an instant.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)