School's Out: A Novel

by Bruce Rogers

Ross Jarboe finds himself stuck in time between his life in the novel’s present—it is set in the late 70’s-- and his life in the past. Twenty some years before, his father moved his family from Boston to the safety of the Colorado Rockies and built an impervious fallout shelter under his house. In the late 60’s, a commune formed not far from where Ross’s family took refuge. “School’s Out” is the name of this community—but the phrase also sums up a growing trend of the time—a generation going out on its own. “No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks.” Freedom—but not freedom without costs and dangers. Ross moves to School’s Out then goes to Mexico with Laurel, a woman he meets there.
The novel opens about ten years later. Ross is a single dad living in Boston. He and his business partner Dean are taking a chance and are opening a Mexican restaurant. The late seventies is a time of change, not just for Ross but for his whole generation. Life is getting more serious; school bells are ringing again. Ross must be a responsible restaurant manager. At the same time he is a bit of a peeping tom, spying on a woman who lives across the alley from him. And his ex-wife Laurel—still living at an almost abandoned School’s Out—haunts his memories.
School’s Out is a historical novel of the not-so-distant past, recalling the way things were almost half a century ago. The language, the attitudes, the details evoke the seventies as effectively as mood rings, Herbal Essence shampoo, disco, sideburns, and bell-bottom pants. Readers who were there and even those who weren’t will feel immersed in the zeitgeist of that time.

522 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 5, 2019

Reviews

[Lee Patton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, the Seventies! School’s Out is a contemporary novel looking back at that era, with the flavors and stylings of its prominent writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Anne Tyler, Richard Brautigan, and Tom Robbins. Young men and women dream, flounder, find life goals and lose them, scramble in the economic mash-up, match up and break apart. The plot’s woven together by two friends in Boston launching a Mexican restaurant, one of whom still has connections to his Colorado upbringing, including his ex-wife’s diehard attachment to a nearby, and now skeletal commune called School’s Out.

Of course, many complications ensue, 70s style. Everywhere, double entendres enough to double you over. A beautiful, idiosyncratic Dutch woman, who’s “acting” in basement pornos (as who, in that era, did not?). A son whose parents are divided by most of the continent. A date taken to one’s brother’s wedding, after which (of course) one sleeps with one’s ex-wife, who has a fond nickname for one’s genitals A whole restaurant staff of willful, independent, quirky folk straight from 70s Central Casting, which the author captures so well––that insistent performance of stubborn self-seeking that both defined and bedeviled the whole era.

Rogers’s greatest accomplishment for me was the skillful and constant use of dialogue to reveal character and advance the story. At times the novel becomes almost a play, and in fact briefly becomes an actual script––one of the novel’s best sequences––a series of interviews with aspiring staff members which reveal value systems and personal quirks that have vanished from our own more deterministic, pragmatic times.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a long time to read this book. But, as a child of the
70's, it was entertaining enough. It would be a great book to
take with you when you're going to have some free time. It was
pretty good to remember back. The writer did a great job writing
about the '70s!

Thank you so much, Netgalley, the writer and publisher for giving me the
chance to read and review this book.