Like Beagle's earlier novel The Last Unicorn (1968), The Folk of the Air explores the social issues of the counterculture of the 1960s. This time, however, the novel is set in the late 1980s and the idealism of the flower generation has turned sinister and commercial.

Nostalgia for the 1960s is most evident in the sense of loss that the main character, Joe Farrell, feels as he returns to the scene of his college days in an old Volkswagen bus. The novel is set in Avicenna, a thinly disguised version of Berkeley, the hub of the Free Speech Movement and antiwar protests twenty years ago. The old student ghetto where Farrell "had been drunk and in love and floating were now either parking lots and university offices." The grand Victorian rooming houses which remain have been gentrified and the rent has quadrupled. The costumed street hippies, "the...