Loss of Innocence

The narrator uses the life narratives of the graduates of Darton Hill’s Class of 1969 to examine how the process of maturing involves the loss of innocence, those simplistic and naïve notions about how the world works and how people operate that define childhood. Here, however, childhood extends well beyond adolescence. The Children of the Sixties, the narrator argues, took their time growing up.

In each of the ten stories, the characters begin with a set of assumptions about how the world works and end the story with a shattering awareness of how little they actually understood. Age has nothing to do with it nor with the fact of graduation. Indeed, the novel suggests that because they were the Children of the Sixties, because that generation was defined by its eager naivete and its willful idealism, that the realities of adulthood came much...