The Year That Trembled

It's 1970. Casey Pedersen and three fellow recent high-school grads have managed to carve out a separate peace for themselves in an Ohio farmhouse called Little Meadow. Phil is the musician, Hairball is the partyer, Jeff is into Buddhist chanting and Casey is the group diarist. As Vietnam looms, however, the Selective Service lottery shatters their haven of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and introspection. What distinguishes Lax's occasionally sappy debut is the sense of impending doom that afflicts his four young men and their next-door neighbors: slightly older Charlie and his supercool wife, Helen, the object of just about everyone's desires. If Casey's philosophical meanderings smack of self-indulgence, the occasional trite metaphor rears its ugly head and the odd anachronism (Keith Moon was not dead yet in 1970) is allowed to slip by, Lax ably depicts the randomness of the draft and mimics the familiar rhetoric of innocence that we associate with the Age of Aquarius, when ""we listened more to new ideas, however sentimental or foolish they sound all these years later in the harsh light of the millennium's end."" (Oct.)