Testing The Current

Growing up in a small upper Midwest town in the late 1930s, young Tommy MacAllister is scarcely aware of the Depression, much less the rumblings of war in Europe. For his parents and their set, life seems to revolve around dinners and dancing at the country club, tennis dates and golf swings, lavish holiday parties and summers on the Island, so many sparkling occasions full of people and drinks and food and laughter. With his curiosity and impatience to grow up, however, Tommy will soon come to glimpse something darker beneath the genteel complacency: the embarrassment of poor relations; the subtle (and not so subtle) slighting of black or Native American servants, Jewish in-laws, and supporters of Roosevelt; the messy mechanics of sex and death; and "the commandment they talked least about in Sunday school," adultery. In this remarkable 1984 debut novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic William McPherson subtly leavens his wide-eyed protagonist's perspective with mature reflection and wry humor, and surrounds him with a sizable cast of vibrant characters, creating a scrupulously observed, kaleidoscopic portrait that will shimmer in readers' minds long after the final page is turned.