Yes, it's amusing and heartrending. But it is more than a clever account of the sixties generation, or the collected inner life of an unsatisfied cohort, or a literary work parading mellifluous skill at saying everything with few words.
In the company of Minnesota's Darton Hall College class of 1969, O'Brien has added texture to middle age and the peculiar power of distant memories to transform reality into fantasy, futility into hope, and loss into longing.
Or visa versa.
This is more than a reading experience, as if an escape to somewhere else. Here's what does happen:
Memories rise into awareness triggered by ancient unrequited love, a crass dismissal, a flippant comment, or a hormone hurried glance. Freed from cobwebs, they sail into the present as gossamer, uninvited and unaided: characters' memories, your memories ... the past revisited, dreams and nightmares found.
To use a Minnesota metaphor, his ribald class reunion is an arrowhead freed from earth. It is a precisely hewed manifestation, chipped from formless flint, utilitarian in purpose, an artifact representing another time, another culture. Like an arrowhead, it can inflict pain or cause wonderment.
"July, July" is 322-pages of bittersweet experience, more pointedly, the part where we leave youth behind and leap into the abyss of middle age.
