SOURCE: "Fiction in Brief," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 4, 1988, p. 4.

In the following review, Raksin provides a plot summary and critique of the novel Love in the Days of Rage.

The author is perhaps best known as the poet laureate of Beat counterculture—co-founder of City Lights Bookstore and Press in San Francisco, inspiration to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—but it is his sensitivity as a painter that is most apparent in this original, intense novel. Like a good visual artist, Ferlinghetti plays with light in these pages, contrasting the bright "masculine" daytime world—society, business and politics—with the feminine night, a haven of sensuousness and introspection. A love affair between Annie and Julian, set against Paris' "old, pearly gray light," represents the night. The day appears only in retrospect, as Julian and Annie reflect on their struggles to come to terms with the...