In a story that captures the zeitgeist of the moment perfectly, Scott Lax portrays the rapt and
terrified attention that a small group of young men paid to events at the
Selective Service in Washington in 1970. The
Year That Trembled follows a strict chronological line in recounting the
year in question; the Beatles, drug abuse, love lives, and what to do about the
Vietnam-era draft weighed heavily on these young men’s minds, and I can tell
you, that part of this story is eerily accurate.
This book is essentially an idyll, with young men desperate
to dodge the Sword of Damocles dangled by the Selective Service System. We
follow young Casey’s point of view as he traipses through his post high-school life,
working as a landscaper, listening to records, and watching his housemates get
high. Casey is a sensitive sort, unsure of what he’ll do if drafted, fond of
his friends, but not really engaged in his life. Casey’s love of his natural
surroundings – he lives in a farmhouse with three friends, and it is surrounded
on three sides by a lovely meadow – is a curative
against the angst of living in America at that time.
This is a focused, personal, and minute account of one young
man’s very difficult journey toward manhood. We can see Casey take the very
first, tiny steps on the path he’ll follow, and can feel the devastating
emotions that accompany his decisions. reads as an elegy; it covers a lost time, in a lost
natural world, and a life no longer available in rural America. There is real
loss, real death, in the story as well, and this novel works extremely well as
an antiwar piece – it’s disheartening to recall how powerful American interests
prosecuted such an apparently pointless, unwinnable war.
The Year That Trembled
enjoys a strength of storytelling based on personal, amusing, and very real observations.
For me, who experienced this time first-hand, it was a trip down memory lane.
For other readers, it offers a spare, economical, and very heartfelt journey.
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