Here’s the absolute worst part. Our old-fogey parents—yours and mine, everybody’s—they didn’t know jack about jack. Couldn’t spell Hanoi if you spotted them the vowels. But one thing they did know, they knew damn well where we’d end up. There knew where all the roads go.
-- Amy Robinson (chapter 1)

Importance: The novel begins with this note of hyperbolic despair and melodramatic frustration. The Children of the ‘60s, who fancied themselves as the generation that rejected their parents and their empty lives and set a new style and tone for living by embracing the horizon and pursuing ideals, ended up exactly where their parents ended up. At this point, that is perceived to be exactly what they most feared back in college. They would be the generation that changed the world and, along the way, give themselves opportunities for living that their parents never knew. That they ended...