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Any Day Now A Novel Terry Bisson 9781590207093 Books

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Any Day Now A Novel Terry Bisson 9781590207093 Books

The novel asks the question, what if the USA, like the USSR in 1991, couldn't keep the center together.? The time of mortal danger for the USA was 1968. The anti- hero is drifting through his own life, so he doesn't play much heed to the societal unraveling around him. A person more alert to what conditions around them mean to them personally, should be growing very uneasy at the ever increasing disorder....

The novel is very well written, and Bisson is very good at creating atmosphere with an economy of words. However, unless a sequel is planned, the reader is left to ponder how it all will eventually work. Is this the foundation for the Robert Heinlein novel " Friday ", in which North America has long been Balkanized? Will the successor states wage wars to enlarge their territory? And, what will happen to personal freedom, in the various breakaway sections? The story ends well before the reader can see the end game, whatever it may finally turn out to be. The set-up turns out to be the entire story.


Tags : Any Day Now: A Novel [Terry Bisson] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <DIV>It is a poignant excursion into the last days of the Beats and the emerging radicalized culture of the sixties from Kentucky to New York City and daringly unique. This road movie of a novel,Terry Bisson,Any Day Now: A Novel,Harry N. Abrams,1590207092,Historical,Bildungsromans,Counterculture,Counterculture.,Counterculture;Fiction.,Nineteen sixties,Nineteen sixties;Fiction.,AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION,FICTION General,FICTION Historical General,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction-Historical,GENERAL,General Adult,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945),United States

Any Day Now A Novel Terry Bisson 9781590207093 Books Reviews

"Any Day Now" is one of the best books on the Sixties I've read (including my own.)Terry Bisson is one of the nation's celebrated Sci-Fi authors (he's won Hugo and Nebula Awards) and has been one of my favorite writers for four decades. (Disclaimer---also one of my closest friends.) He lived the truths he describes in his pages, and in some cases we lived them together. He's one of the most wry and funny minds around, and now he's moved into "reality", which in Terry's case means, "almost" real. I said once that he could snap a tooth out a comb and slide you through an opening no wider than that into another reality without your realizing it. The last third of his book, the "what if" Robert Kennedy has not died is wondrous. Why no national reviewers have deigned to review this book is an order of injustice like considering Newt Gingrich a spokesman for anything but self-interest. I urge you to read it.
Peter Coyote, author, "Sleeping Where I Fall."
This novel starts out extremely well, capturing the confusion and hope that young people felt at the start of the 1960s. Ostensibly a coming of age novel for Clay, a naive Kentuckian just becoming aware of the opportunities beyond his rural upbringing. Fascinated by Beatniks (and later Hippies), the shifting music scene, and the chances for meeting sophisticated, sexy women, he sets out on the traditional journey of discovery. In many ways, however, Clay remains the perpetual naif, and because of this, author Bisson falters in the tale's second half. He freely rewrites facts about the Sixties, brings in famous figures from the decade in inaccurate ways, and slowly ends up writing a confusing story that history buffs, in particular, might well take issue with. But casual readers as well will probably find his increasingly scattershot approach both to his characters and the novel unsatisfactory.
Terry Bisson's _Any Day Now_ is a surprisingly lovely novel of the '60s told in a spare, dialog-heavy, fast-moving style. It begins as a historical novel -- a richly rendered coming-of-age story set in a western Kentucky slowly and a bit unwillingly being dragged into the Fifties and Sixties -- and follows its protagonist from there to college, then to the tumult of early-60s New York, and from there to the communes and social upheaval of the late Sixties in the Western deserts. Each of these settings is rendered revealingly through a few beautiful little moments of observation (the way anyone with a beard and a jazz album in Kentucky is a suspicious "beatnik"; the difficulty of getting insulation to stick to the roof of a geodesic dome with improvised glue). And the book's spare, to-the-point, episodic narrative style keeps the plot hustling along, even if it occasionally leaves us wanting a bit more psychology and characterization than we're given.

The novel is worth reading for the observations and characters alone, and Bisson's eye for detail is often as impressive as his ear for dialogue -- but the realism of the novel's evocation of a vanished age isn't, as it turns out, its only point. There's a second game afoot. Though the book begins as a straightforward historical novel, it soon shades, sneakily, into alternate history; it's done so much on the sly and in the background, cleverly, that readers won't notice it happening right away, but the world of the novel slowly diverges from our own history, heading another direction entirely. It's hard to say much more than this without badly spoiling the experience of reading the book for the first time; suffice it to say the novel is clearly meant as an act of political imagination, a complicated exploration of what might have been, neither entirely utopian nor dystopian (though, amusingly, some reviewers have called it each). The America of the late Sixties that Bisson brings us here is not a place that anyone truly lived in then, but it is nonetheless where many people's imaginations lived, a realistic evocation of the future people in the Sixties imagined for themselves -- a time of revolutionary possibility, militaristic danger, terrifying instability, and deep familiarity all at once.

The book's greatest feat is to evoke that instability, hope, and fear so well it's set, by the end, in a world where no one can quite tell whether they should be planning for a quiet year of smoking weed in the mountains, or a full-scale civil war. This book is well worth reading as a historical novel, too -- but it's a document of the *imagined* history of the Sixties as well as a realistic evocation of a lot of what Sixties life was about. I hope it will find a wide audience, outside of the SF readership as well as within it.
The characters in this book took the long way to Colorado in the late sixties. Clay took himself from western Kentucky to NYC to write poetry. He fell in with the hippie movement along with 'Weather' which seems to be a radical and sometimes violent left wing group fashioned after the Weather Underground. He and his friends made their way by different routes to southern Colorado in the not so mythical communes of the Huerfano Valley. The town of Burg can only be Walsenburg. The backdrop is a nation coming apart in a completely different way in which it really came apart.
The novel asks the question, what if the USA, like the USSR in 1991, couldn't keep the center together.? The time of mortal danger for the USA was 1968. The anti- hero is drifting through his own life, so he doesn't play much heed to the societal unraveling around him. A person more alert to what conditions around them mean to them personally, should be growing very uneasy at the ever increasing disorder....

The novel is very well written, and Bisson is very good at creating atmosphere with an economy of words. However, unless a sequel is planned, the reader is left to ponder how it all will eventually work. Is this the foundation for the Robert Heinlein novel " Friday ", in which North America has long been Balkanized? Will the successor states wage wars to enlarge their territory? And, what will happen to personal freedom, in the various breakaway sections? The story ends well before the reader can see the end game, whatever it may finally turn out to be. The set-up turns out to be the entire story.