1969. Southern California.
For fifteen-year-old Rick Leibnitz, the whole world is on the horizon —just out of reach. Abandoned by his mother to the care of his abusive father, he quashes his dreams in favor of survival. But when an attempt to protect a friend goes wrong, Rick lands in juvie. Emerging from his incarceration, he finds an unlikely ally.
Free spirited teenager Lincoln Ellard is on a mission to expand the minds of all he meets. When the discovery of a dirty secret gives Rick the leverage he needs to leave his childhood home for good, Linc offers him a new path. A small drug supply goes a long way to providing the boys with the means for sex, psychedelics, music, philosophy, and friendship.
But even as the steady stream of free love and mind-altering experiences opens their eyes to new perspectives, Rick and Linc remain blind to the dangers of their trade. Until it’s too late.
With their teenage dreams in tatters, history looks set to repeat itself — unless Rick can find freedom in starting over.
Isaak’s second in The Isaak Collection (published posthumously by his wife, Pamela Blake) follows Tomorrowville and offers a nuanced glimpse of late 1960s American counterculture through the eyes of 15-year-old Rick Leibnitz, whose childhood is overturned when his mother leaves with his two siblings in tow, abandoning Rick to his abusive father. After a stint in juvie, Rick meets freethinking fellow high schooler Lincoln Ellard, and his worldview is transformed; the two read books, do drugs, and chase girls together, living a bohemian life of their own making, even starting their own high-brow salon in the process. But adolescence can’t last forever, and before long, the pair become mired in the muck that comes with growing up.Rick and Lincoln straddle the cusp of adulthood throughout—a taxing gig that’s reflected in Lincoln’s flippant assessment of Yucaipa, their isolated Californian city: “I like it here…the edge is where everything happens. Ask any chemist. Ask any historian.” The story takes its cue from there, as the boys construct a new world for themselves at “the edge of nowhere,” a world that’s scattered with fitting references—literary, musical, and political—that signal the ‘60s fringe culture shaping their capering. Isaak takes pains to showcase that culture, whether it’s Rick’s assessment of I Am Curious (Yellow) as “vague [and] unfocused” or the veiled references to the helpless horror of the Vietnam War.
Isaak is careful to treat the story’s evolution with a light, humorous touch, avoiding the pitfall of taking coming-of-age revelations too seriously, but the characters of Rick and Lincoln are neither glorified nor treated dismissively: they’re portrayed as impressive but ultimately ingenuous young boys doing the best they can to navigate the treacherous waters of becoming an adult. Isaak’s deft merging of teen angst with of-age awakenings makes this a treasure.
Takeaway: Teen boys navigate America’s 1960s fringe culture in this stellar coming-of-age.
Comparable Titles: Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, Ellen Meeropol’s Her Sister’s Tattoo.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
A troubled teen experiences the freedoms and dangers of 1960s California youth culture in Isaak’s coming-of-age novel.
It’s 1969, four years since Rick Leibnitz’s mother fled their Redlands, California, home, taking his younger brother and sister away to escape beatings by Rick’s father. Fifteen-year-old Rick and his father have long “discarded any pretense of trying to get along.” His father tries to forcibly cut Rick’s long hair and reveals that Rick is his “only son.” For Rick, it’s an epiphany: “I almost laughed. The way I felt about him, how could I blame her? I’d leave me too.” Later, Rick is sitting outside his house when 17-year-old Stacy Slater, one of many girls who star in his masturbatory fantasies, stumbles up to a neighbor’s door. After no one answers, Stacy and Rick go to a nearby orange grove, where he loses his virginity to her. Stacy asks Rick to stash her drugs, and he gets picked up by the cops shortly thereafter. Sent to juvenile detention, Rick refuses to rat on Stacy and again resists getting a haircut. Leo Malheur, Rick’s “tall and coal-black” probation officer, brokers his release, although Rick’s father, who has moved to nearby Yucaipa, now plans to send Rick to military school the following year. Lincoln Ellard, a charismatic classmate at Rick’s Yucaipa school, helps Rick avoid this fate. The boys get a house together, where Lincoln leads intellectual “salon” discussions and lets Rick in on his drug running operations. Rick enjoys a psychedelic summer of sex and drugs until trouble arises, leading to another jail stint and new information that inspires him to hit the road to reconnect with his mother.
The articulate and introspective narrator observes and engages in a “trippy” world reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, substituting the groovy late 1960s for the go-getter 1980s. As Rick muses at the end of the novel: “There were sick people among us, just as in any other generation, and hair and clothes and attitudes and drugs for them were nothing more than disguises they had donned. What had been glorious craziness in the summer looked more like actual madness in the fall.” The book packs a lot of characters and subplots into its pages, including finely etched moments focused on Rick’s probation officer, who strives for justice, is subject to racist remarks, and is in danger of being drafted. Lincoln is a marvelously drawn flawed-prophet figure who ultimately realizes he’s been “dangerously naïve.” The narrative very effectively captures a male teen’s sex-on-the-brain obsession with girls yet also fleshes out its female characters with thoughts and problems of their own. A particularly memorable sequence concerns a “pulling a train” event (group sex with one female and multiple male partners taking turns) at a party and the subsequent perspectives of both the girl involved and the girls who watched it happen.
An atmospheric, eloquent depiction of teen angst and discovery in the twilight years of California’s counterculture era.
ReadFree.ly
20 August 2023
15 year-old Rick’s life is a mess. His mother has upped and left his violent father, taking all of Rick’s siblings with her, but leaving him behind. And then he is caught with a pocketful of weed and ends up spending the next few weeks in juvie.
Welcome to 1960s California. It’s an era of free love, psychedelic drugs and liberation. It’s a heady time for a young, poetic soul to to be left rudderless in the world.
When he emerges from juvie, Rick is taken under the wing of 16 year-old Lincoln. Together they will discover sex, love, Literature, and even more sex in an America such as there has never been before and, possibly, will never be again.
It is a dream. It cannot last. It must end. It must end in murder.
The Great American Novel, as I learned in college, is a novel that in telling the story of one American will tell the story of all Americans; in telling the story of one moment in time will somehow tell the story of all of American history. Its writing will be simple yet intricate, its scope will be focussed yet breathtaking.
In so many ways A Map of the Edge ticks all of these boxes. It is a book that I can imagine people reading decades from now and enjoying it as much as I have enjoyed it. In being so specific, it manages to be timeless.
Oh, one final criterion for the Great American Novel? It should not be recognised during the lifetime of its author.
David T Isaak sadly passed away in 2021.
I rest my case.
