Hippie Homeschooling

by Carlton Smith

Overview

After driving his Cadillac into the icy waters beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, Jerry mysteriously wakes up in a San Francisco rehab, before setting off to find his lost son, Ethan. Along the way he meets up with a young runaway named Lily and her anarchist boyfriend, Max. Before long Lily's mother, Talia-an erudite if finicky art professor-joins the group, all of them on the road searching for Ethan, and salvation. Set amid the vast spaces between San Francisco, the Salton Sea, Arizona's Four Corners, Lassen, and the lush banks of California's Russian River, Hippie Homeschooling is a road story that chronicles the end of a hippie dream, a novel that links the remnants of the psychedelic generation to today's twenty-first century hipsters, while it explores the perennial possibility of love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780985949525
Publisher:	Blue West Books
Publication date:	05/01/2013
Pages:	366
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.82(d)

Editorial Reviews

2014-04-28
In Smith's debut novel, a reformed hippie hits the road one final time in a quest to find his runaway son, and along the way, he finds himself.Jerry knew he'd hit rock bottom when he drove his Cadillac into San Francisco Bay 10 years before. A lifetime of booze and drugs had finally taken its toll. Although he's now clean and helping others who have gone down some of life's darker paths, Jerry is haunted by the fact that his son, Ethan, ran away. Ethan and his mom aren't the only people Jerry has lost, however; in a very real sense, he's also lost himself. Plagued by a selective amnesia after his plunge into the bay, he doesn't even remember his own name, but he's committed to righting his life's wrongs. His first step is to track down Ethan, against the advice of his friend, sobriety mentor and dharmic guide Mahatma ("You no ready," he says). Along the way, Jerry befriends uptight Talia and her daughter, Lily, a runaway like Ethan. Lily is committed to living on the road with her boyfriend, Max, a wannabe messianic figure who dreams of escaping the strictures of society (and the law) in the Canadian Rockies, but she begrudgingly allows her mother to follow their latter-day hippie caravan, so long as Talia travels with Jerry. It's an imperfect but beneficial arrangement: Talia can keep an eye on her daughter, while all three of them search for Ethan. Although the novel's stakes are high, this is a quiet read, deeply focused on the inner journey of its protagonist. Smith does a commendable job drawing on California's quixotic beauty to limn the subtle shifts in Jerry's struggle with sobriety and grief ("Jerry sat on the grassy knoll, watching the crab fishers stringing nets out on the pier. A thin sheet of clouds swept past the bridge, blurring the crisp lines of the cables"). Likewise, as Jerry's fragmented memory begins to coalesce around one horrifying realization, Smith's controlled prose keeps the tension tight. It's Talia that gets to sum up the novel's thesis, though, when she confronts Jerry at his lowest point: "This trip," she says, "if it's about anything it's about not running away."An engaging novel about one man's road trip to the heart of darkness: himself.

Kirkus Reviews