One Big Bed - Hardcover

Krich, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0070354081 ISBN 13: 9780070354081

Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 1987

Synopsis

Set in Berkeley, California, this novel follows Martin Pepper, a sixties counterculture and Me decade survivor, as he faces the hardships of the Reagan eighties

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Imagine a sort of The Big Chill with flashbacks, and you have One Big Bed. It is the story of Martin Pepper, a lonely film critic who lives in Berkeley, Calif., and is unbearably nostalgic for his 1960s adventures. Years ago, he was dumped by Missy, his first love, and he has yet to recover from this loss, as well as from the moving on of his college roommates. The novel covers 24 hours, on July 14th, Bastille Day, when Martin and his old college friends gather for a reunion at Missy's (and her husband Spyro's) house. To make the present relationships among the characters clearer, and to show Martin's eventual surrender to his memories, Krich (author of the nonfiction Music in Every Room intersperses flashbacks throughout. The novel is also scattered with pithy aphorisms, most of which could have come from fortune cookies for intellectuals. This splicing, meant to be cinematic, makes for a diffuse narrative, but it does contain some extraordinarily witty bits. And the solution to the question of the dayIs Martin doomed to loneliness?is never in doubt. 20,000 first printing, 15,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Martin Pepper, film critic for an obscure Oakland newspaper, recalls his early years as a revolutionary zealot in SDS, and in the process offers a glimpse of the New Left just at the moment its internal contradictions caused it to self-destruct. The story is a variation on The Big Chill and The Return of the Secaucus Seven, except that the radicals in those two films were lovable Doonesbury types and Pepper's Marxist cronies make your hair stand on end. The narrative persona in this autobiographical novel is basically the same fellow we met in Krich's travelogue Music in Every Room (LJ 4/15/84) addicted to puns and exclamation marks, dedicated to thumbing his nose at the booboisie. Recommended mainly to children of the Sixties; others will have trouble with the frequent allusions to forgotten sit-ins and demonstrations. Edward B. St. John, Loyola Marymount Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0070354081
• ISBN 13: 9780070354081
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 356