| Lost Illusions is about life in the middle-class counter-culture in the 1970's. It is about sex, drugs, and religion, taken as the great seductions of the decade. Jon Fortch comes home from Vietnam to find his generation's world at odds with the myths and ideals of his father's. Rejecting the limits of those illusory social forms, he goes seeking truth in the forbidden places. Though it is not intended the book be gratuitously pornographic, subversive, or blasphemous, it is probably fair to say that those who judge works to have those qualities might find everything they need to do so in these pages. Jon and Rigel try to keep a marriage together through the fast changes of the time. Drugs and social sex are the common recreations among their peers, and they are not exceptions. Jon's arthritic mother is addicted to prescription drugs for which his father pays hugely and praises the doctors, a bitter irony reinforcing Jon's desire to further 'drop out' of the illusions of respectability. Others in their world are the hard-partying seductress Belle Tyron, her pre-teen daughter LaWanda and naive young husband Cooper, heybro hippie Norman 'Malachi Rainbow' Zimmerman, Jon's drab vestry-conservative older sister Pauline, who has a strange fixation on the mantis, jet-set cocaine contact Piper Panszczewicz, and The Reverend Will B. Dunne, master of Dunsalem, a fundamentalist family church. Here too, they find their relationship challenged and shaken, and must dispense with illusions to survive. Lost Illusions is an emotionally churning journey through a turbulent decade of often perilous exploration of the human experience. |
