Dark Matters

Rating:
Summary: Do yourself a favor: read this novel
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It is funny, fluent, passionate, sad and contemporary. Dark Matters offers a hilarious and poignant look at four very different students attending college in the 1950s. They respond to controversy re: the forced signing of the loyalty oath, learning on a local level about the evils of McCarthyism and repressive politics. Of course, being college students, political affiliation is only one of their challenges: they also enjoy love, sex, religious debates, familial reminiscences. There are hilarious scenes in which at least one political radical attends a sorority party! From the local scene at University of Colorado, the students follow each other and their good intentions to New Mexico to support a mining strike. While fighting repression and exploitation on a state level, they learn more about themselves and each other. Finally, we follow the foursome through graduation (or not) and into adulthood. Each makes different choices, for better and for worse-and all are entwined as a result of their shared youthful passions. Marriages, children and jobs unfold with surprising twists and turns. Finally, more than a decade after college, the political stage shifts to international concerns: the reactionary regime that follows the overthrow of Dubcek in Czechoslovakia. We see the heartbreaking harvest of this regime and the terrible cost of resisting it. Throughout the novel, individuals respond to institutional disregard for personal freedom. I closed the novel feeling satisfied and uneasy: satisfied by a good read, including laughter, tenderness and sorrow as young students, more and less idealistic, tangle with the life and politics of their time; disturbed by the contemporary implications of our own choices as we encounter abuses of individual rights in our own societies.
Read this book: you will have a wonderful time, learn some fascinating history, be challenged and uplifted.

Rating:
Summary: A timely revisiting of McCarthyism
Review: In the era of the probably unconstitutional, Orwellian-entitled "Patriot Act," Dark Matters examines class warfare and the suppression of civil liberties on several levels: social, political, and moral. Like most good novels, it explores the intersections of landed aristocrats with middle-class strivers, principally academics, as well as the exploitation of the working classes by management, and with compelling psychological insights and unexpected flashes of humor it presents an international cast of well differentiated characters espousing varying political beliefs. The principal constituencies of a public university are perceptively portrayed, from the toadying administration bending to the state legislature's will through academic politics among the faculty to the students coping with hypocritical parietal rules and issues such as abortion that remain timely and controversial. It candidly reveals the limited career possibilities for humanities graduates, such as working in a regional post office's dead letter department, and it captures the incipient sexual revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Structured as a universe of credible characters interacting in a realistic plot, Dark Matters is a serious, well crafted novel written by a full professor of English and writing, published by a neighboring state's university press. This work is highly suitable not only for all readers of substantive fiction but also for aspiring writers as a grounding in the traditions that must shape the flowering of their individual talents.