Chapters: a Novel

Chapters is set in the early 1970s, with locations alternating between the city of Minneapolis and the great north woods of the Minnesota/Manitoba border region. The story follows this bunch of guys growing up in a time of war, both domestic and abroad, and how that played as America recovered from Viet Nam and celebrated its Bicentennial in 1976. In some ways, these are pretty normal guys who live in a party house near a university as social and political unrest unspools in the streets around them. It is a time of sex, and drugs, and rock-and-roll – with gender politics and environmental awareness in the news. Then a naked man is slaughtered in their garage by a peevish survivalist, and everything takes a turn. There is no mystery, no hilarious confrontations with authority, and no manhunt in the forest. These come much later. What there is, is nuns and smugglers who quietly ride the underground railway in the middle of the woods. When one of the guys, a big city boy, stumbles across a small-town secret, there are histories, mysteries, and a buried treasure, sort of. Chapters is written in the manner of a 1970s contemporary novel, sometimes called metafiction. At times the fiction theorizes about fiction, while it demonstrates fiction, and recursively explains itself in its own terms as a way of getting to story telling truths. Like the gonzo journalism of those times, this is a gonzo fiction. It is also a ripping good yarn.