Customer Reviews

Finding Woodstock

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Young idealists beware. That oblivious balding guy-the one with the sad little ponytail and thecell phone stuck to his ear who just cut you off inhis $50,000 SUV-used to be a hippie. He used to stay up all night tripping, talking about free love and overthrowing the military/industrial complex. The closest he gets to free love now is the 60 hours a week he spends at his job, with his face planted firmly between the arse cheeks of The Man. Any of us could be next, if we're not careful.

So it went for Harry Lascome in Finding Woodstock. He's a mild, unnoticed man who, at his wife Beth's prodding, moves his family to the suburbs over the protests of their two unhappy kids. His life begins to slip off the tracks when Beth runs off to San Francisco with another suburban housewife to explore some free love of their own. In rapid succession, Harry loses his job and is preparing to move with his kids back to the city (sans wife), when he learns that he stands to inherit $8 million, provided he lives in a rickety Catskills farmhouse and takes care of a deceased client's cat for one year.

Once there Harry finds that his only neighbors are the remnants of a '60s commune, reduced to two people, Moon Crater and his daughter Moon Light. Odd though they seem at first, over time Harry finds that it's his old life that has taken on an otherworldliness in his mind; it's the suburbs that seem surreal from the vantage point of the quiet winter woods.

Built on a foundation of black humor a la Kurt Vonnegut and generously underpinned with jabs at the slow strangulation of life in the suburbs, Tillman's book amuses without giving up any of its pointed barbs. Finding Woodstock is an excellent read for those of us who wonder how anyone who lives in a $300,000 house in a lily-white, economically gated community can justify calling themselves a liberal. And it's a call to action - or a requiem - for any aging boomers out there who might still have a nagging ghost of a recollection of all they gave up when they started moving on up. -Kurt J. Brighton