Alex Underground

by Jonathan Lerner

FINALLY, A NOVEL ABOUT THE RADICAL UNDERGROUND BY ONE WHO WAS THERE. It is 1970: the era of sex, drugs and revolution... Alex gives a speech that incites a deadly campus riot; he and Doug take off on the run. They travel between Chicago, Paris, London, Havana, highways and hideouts, cocktail bars and cruising spots. For what? To be operatives in a political underground? Stars of their own movie? All-night drives, secret meetings in shadowed streets, a bank heist that goes spectacularly wrong. Meanwhile, this clandestine life gives Alex the space to explore his own furtive secrets. "That awful year," he will reflect upon it much later, "when a benign impulse to remake the world led me to do so many strange and regrettable things." Jonathan Lerner, a founding member of the Weather Underground, draws on memory and imagination to tell an authentic story of politics and passion.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

234 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2009

About the author

When Jonathan Lerner's first novel Caught in a Still Place was published, Booklist said, “Lerner breaks the mold. Candid, understated, self-effacing, funny, as stripped down as the emptied world."

Caught in a Still Place describes a dystopian future when a group of people on an obscure Florida island survive a mysterious plague.

Lerner's other books are the novel Alex Underground and the memoir Swords in the Hands of Children. Both deal with his experiences in the radical movement of the Sixties, and the challenges of doing so as a young gay man. His novel Lily Narcissus is about an American expat family in Asia in the Vietnam War era.

He is also an award-winning journalist focusing on travel, architecture and environment. His work has run in The New York Times, Metropolis, Travel+Leisure, Men's Journal, Modern Maturity and elsewhere, and he is a contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine.

He lives with his husband in New York's Hudson Valley.

Reviews

[Steven Kruger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting take on the "coming out" story. The ending is a little abrupt, though.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I though it was an interesting take on that time period