STUDENT IN THE UNDERWORLD

A man fresh from the Navy must revitalize a leftist playhouse in this satirical counterculture novel.

San Francisco, 1968. The oddly named Student Patterson has just wrapped up his naval service aboard a refrigerator ship, but his post-discharge plans are not panning out. His fiancee, Debbie, sent him a Dear John letter—calling him a killer and also explaining their lack of sexual compatibility. Student then drowned his grief in a brothel in Saigon, and he now has a full complement of venereal diseases to deal with. He can at least enter his theater and folklore Ph.D. program as planned—though his advising professor has determined he is painfully underqualified. Student’s assigned to put on a play in the theater of the Butcher’s Town Writer’s Guild, which he discovers—just after he is pickpocketed—sits in a bad part of the city. During his initial meeting with the Thespian Committee, Student’s heart sinks further: “This collection of lame-brained, anachronistic Never-Weres and Has-Beens added up to the most catastrophic graduate program” in the long history “of colleges and universities. If needs be, he would hitchhike back to Iowa and raise chickens.” Due to his recent experiences with Debbie, Student has decided to adopt a “program of informed misogyny.” But his anti-women policy will be challenged by several students and colleagues, including the middle-aged socialist and set designer Millicent Rothstein, the grade-grubbing mother of two Jessica Bolton, and Debbie, who has not yet left his life for good—and who now has a baby in tow. Can Student repair his relationship with women, put on his play, earn his Ph.D., and successfully bridge the cultural gap between Vietnam veterans and hippie longhairs? It’s San Francisco in the late ’60s, so anything is possible.

Warner’s playful satire skewers many of the familiar types one finds in stories of ’60s America, often in unexpected ways. For instance, Student’s pickpocketing occurs when he’s stopped on his way to the theater by two older women who wish to give a hug to a patriotic serviceman—and promptly rob him blind. “One thing Mr. Student—south of Market—you worry less about flowers in your hair and more about creatures like those two misfits of femininity—they are a more effective criminal combo than if Mata-Hari and Carmen teamed up,” warns one of his new theater colleagues. The book has a number of postmodern flourishes, including a literal Greek chorus, the “Seers of Future Present,” that breaks in from time to time to warn Student about the trouble he’s about to get in for offending various powers. The story attempts to undermine Student’s posture of misogyny, but in doing so, it acts out quite a bit of it. There’s a lot of sexualizing going on—in part, perhaps, due to the free-love projects of many of the characters—but it sometimes leads to moments of extreme unpleasantness. (For instance, the Saigon sex workers Student patronizes are remarked to be no older than 15 years old.) The novel ends up walking a fine line between serving as a satire of a certain sort of libidinous male fantasy and becoming the thing itself.

A sometimes enjoyable, sometimes uneven homage to an oft-romanticized era.