The Millennium Shows

by Philip Baruth

The Millennium Shows is a penetrating and prescient interpretation of the sociological implications of the early 90s Deadhead scene. Yet to say The Millennium Shows is a landmark of Grateful Dead fiction is to sell it short. The Millennium Shows is a landmark of American fiction a prophetic page-turner that is mysterious, visionary, horrifying, and compulsively readable. It is a tale of displacement, angst, love, and the struggle of a regular guy to maintain his autonomy in the face of an intrusive and increasingly hive-like society. Indeed, author Philip Baruth burrows deep into the darker side of Deadhead culture. With his mysterious and conflicted narrator, Story, we move through the underworld of traveling families bound together and wrenched apart by the encroaching pressures of surviving outside mainstream America. But there is more than Deadhead culture here. There is a Burroughsian insect awareness of claustrophobic catacomb energies that will reach deep inside of you and shift your perception in almost chemical ways. Joan Didion, in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a highly critical essay on the young hippies of the Haight Ashbury, made this We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically ill-equipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Likewise, we see this attempt fully extrapolated a generation later in The Millennium Shows. Yet, unlike Didion, Baruth s portrayal is not an outsider's. His viewpoint character, named Story, who at one point tells us that There was never a day in the history of the world when there was less resistance to passing into a group, takes the reader inside the caravanning Deadhead scene. Most mornings we rippled into consciousness, Story says, always viewing his world with languid vividness. It isn't until well into this finely nuanced novel that our protagonist s steady, omniscient tone begins unraveling into psychic dissonance.

157 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1994

About the author

Philip Baruth is a novelist, and has spent twelve years as a regular commentator for Vermont Public Radio. His commentary series, “Notes from the New Vermont,” focused on both the national and the local, the deeply political and the undeniably absurd.

In addition to Vermont Associated Press awards for commentary on Howard Dean and the effects of 9/11, Philip won a national Public Radio News Directors Award for “Lonesome Jim Does Totally Gnarly,” a spoof of Jeffords’s split with the GOP. “Birth Rate Blues,” his satirical take on Vermont’s low fertility stats, shared a 2009 Edward R. Murrow Award in the Overall Excellence category, then won a Public Radio News Directors Award several months later.

His 2003 novel The X President took this penchant for satire to new lengths: the book follows the desperate attempts of a 109-year-old Bill Clinton to re-write his historical legacy. The New York Times selected The X President as a Notable Book of 2003.

Philip lives in Burlington, Vermont, and has taught at the University of Vermont since 1993. Before that time, he earned a B.A. at Brown University, and his Ph.D at the University of California, Irvine. His latest novel, The Brothers Boswell (Soho Press), is a literary thriller, tracing the famous friendship between James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, author of the first modern dictionary. The Washington Post eventually selected Brothers Boswell as one of the Best Books of 2009.