America Was Hard to Find

March 18, 2019
This richly ruminative novel refracts 30 years of American culture and history through the lives of characters who serve as surrogates for their historical counterparts. In 1957, Fay Fern is working as a bartender in her sister’s dive bar in the Mojave Desert when she begins an affair with Vincent Kahn, one of the astronauts in training in America’s nascent space program. In 12 years, Vincent will become the first man to walk on the moon, and Fay, who leaves him in 1960 while pregnant with a son she never told him about, will have drifted to the radical side of the counterculture as a member of Shelter, an extremist group loosely modeled on the Weather Underground. In the 1980s, Fay and Vincent’s son, Wright, who is gay, flees the climate of AIDS activism his partner has embraced to seek out the father he never met. Alcott (Infinite Home) humanizes her characters by focusing intensively on their thoughts and feelings as they grapple with the grand significance of their times and personal experiences, especially Vincent, who thinks of himself as one of the “men with the defining moment of their life now behind them, totally and forever irrelevant.” Alcott’s novel is a sharp and moving reminder of the human dimension of even the most outsize historical events.

March 1, 2019
An unlikely affair has lasting consequences for two people seeking certainty in the chaotic America of the Vietnam War era.Repulsed by her parents' privileged lifestyle and moralistic condemnation of her lesbian sister, 19-year-old Fay comes to work in 1957 at Charlie's bar in the Mojave Desert, where Vincent Kahn is one of the pilots testing the new X-15 at Edwards Air Force Base. He's married; their backgrounds, interests, and convictions are decidedly different; yet the relationship endures for two and a half years. Alcott (Infinite Home, 2015, etc.) portrays in evocative snapshots an inner core of solitude and fiercely individual rectitude in each that binds the lovers yet precludes a lasting relationship. Vincent decides to make a break and join the space program, unaware that he is leaving Fay pregnant. Their divergent paths through the 1960s take Fay to Ecuador with son Wright in tow, Vincent to Houston and the Apollo spacecraft. He becomes the first man to step onto the moon shortly before she returns with a Vietnam veteran-turned-militant anti-war activist to the States, there to engage in a series of increasingly lunatic protest gestures. Fay's commitment would be more comprehensible if it weren't depicted primarily through her young son's bewildered eyes; the author seems more intuitively understanding of Vincent's profound lack of conviction, a bone-deep need for solitude assuaged only on the moon and in the high desert. The book's final third, centered on Wright's adult life in 1980s San Francisco, suggests that Alcott aims to synthesize three personal odysseys into a larger statement--but what that might be is obscured by her elliptical narrative development. Nonetheless, her empathy for troubled souls, rendered in haunting, impressionistic prose, makes a powerful emotional impact, giving the novel a staying power beyond that of more neatly finished fiction.Uneven and at times frustratingly enigmatic but impressively ambitious and extremely well-written.

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Starred review from April 1, 2019
Like Franzen or DeLillo, Alcott brings awe-inspiring exactitude and lyricism to her dive into three of America's most iconic moments: the race to space, the rage against the Vietnam War, and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. Three indelible characters embody truths about this country in transition: Vincent Kahn, a test pilot training at Edwards Air Force Base for the first Astronaut Corps; Fay Fern, daughter of wealth and fortune thumbing her nose at her parents' and country's excessive ways while working at a dive bar her sister owns; and Wright Fern, Fay's son, the permanent result of her transitory affair with Vincent. Vincent's towering fame as the first man on the moon ultimately leads him to a life of seclusion, while Fay's fury at the injustices of war draws her to Shelter, a domestic terrorist group in which her role in a deadly bombing makes her one of America's most wanted. Rejecting his mother's politics and precarious lifestyle, teenage Wright explores his true sexual nature in San Francisco in the early 1980s, to both life-affirming and deadly effect. In her exquisite and poignant reimagining of historic events, Alcott dissects their impacts in a sweeping yet intimate saga that challenges assumptions and assesses the depths of human frustration.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)