Terminal Velocity
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"In 1970 I realized that the Sixties were passing me by. I had never even smoked a joint, or slept with anyone besides my husband. A year later I had left Nicky, changed my name from Ellen to Rain, and moved to a radical lesbian commune in California named Red Moon Rising, where I was playing the Ten of Hearts in an outdoor production of Alice in Wonderland when two FBI agents arrived to arrest the Red Queen . . ."
So begins Blanche McCrary Boyd's brilliantly raucous account of self-styled feminist outlaws, their desperate adventures and extraordinary fates. Ellen, the narrator of Boyd's previous novel, The Revolution of Little Girls, this time pierces the heart of the sexual revolution in her quest to find a woman hero or--by default--to become one.
Ferociously paced, Terminal Velocity delineates six wonderfully engaging characters: Artemis Foote, for whom being rich, talented, and beautiful is a kind of game; Jordan, a messianic fugitive who becomes Ellen's lover; Amethyst Woman, a Marxist/Leninist dentist; Ross, a red-diaper baby and now a columnist for Ramparts; and Pearl, an art history professor turned hippie. At the center of this vortex is Ellen, prior to her transformation happily married and a rising young editor at a genteel publishing house in Boston. Together with these women, she is caught in the political and moral tailspin of the Sixties, living in a sexualized world-without-boundaries that leads them, eventually, to destruction, acceptance, and even redemption.
Deadpan funny and exquisitely moving, Terminal Velocity brings Boyd's lyricism, humor, and depth to material largely unexplored in American literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A rollicking, kaleidoscopic trip through the drug-tinged lesbian-feminist counter-culture of the 1970s, Boyd's second novel (after The Revolution of Little Girls) opens as two FBI agents arrive at a "radical lesbian commune" in California, the Red Moon Rising, in the midst of a musical production of Alice in Wonderland. Through a psilocybin haze, Boyd's protagonist and narrator, the self-styled Rain, once a mild-mannered, married junior book editor in Boston named Ellen Burns Sommers, recognizes her lover, Jordan Wallace, in the photo the agents are passing around of two hippies wanted for their participation in the bombing of a Honolulu bank. Soon Rain and Jordan are on the run, living motel-to-motel in a blur of alcohol, painkillers, disguises and pseudonyms--an odyssey that ends in a nervous breakdown, hospitalization and electroshock treatment for Rain and prison for Jordan. Ellen finally lands on her feet, after a stint in AA and after learning to skydive. The pattern of lives adrift, drug abuse and mental collapse that sets the tone for Boyd's most recent novel is more sharply focused here as Rain tells her tale in a wry and detached voice that attains considerable raw narrative velocity. As Ellen tumbles down a rabbit hole of sexual and political radicalism, the book shifts into third-person, reflecting her growing mental dislocation. This study of the political rage, confusion and idealism of the 1970s will also strike a chord with an audience too young to remember that decade.