Not That Far

Not That Far follows Marlon Brando Plover, who, approaching his thirtieth birthday, gets a job in outreach at UC Berkeley and struggles with ambivalent feelings about making a career and committing to marriage. Set in the mid-1980s, the novel, comic in tone, focuses on the politics of race and affirmative action, the struggle to endure within a large bureaucracy, the tension between the hunger for passion and the comfort of daily routines, and the consequences of not paying careful attention to the world as it is.