The moon stops here

It's 1969 and fourteen-year-old Teddy, his sixteen-year-old sister Cora, and their mother, Rosemary, are packing up the car to drive from Massachusetts to San Francisco. From California the dependents, as they think of themselves, will ship out to join their husband/father. He is stationed in Formosa, where, as Cora comments, "everything in the world under a dollar ninety-eight is made." Joining them to help share the driving is their cousin Bobbie, who may or may not. Have left her husband. The plan is to take it easy and make the drive fun as well as educational, with lots of stops along the way. And there are: from Amish country to Graceland to the Alamo. As the family drives toward their destination and the novel moves along we learn the ultimate goal of each member. Rosemary is hoping the trip will end with a reconciliation and renewed domesticity and togetherness; Bobbie hopes her husband will miss her and summon her back; Cora. Wants to stay in Hollywood mingling with movie stars and eventually become a powerful director; and Teddy, the narrator, just wants everyone to be happy. Listening to Teddy tell the story, we are exactly back in the mind of a precocious boy in the late sixties. He's being bombarded with news about the moon landing and the conflicting feelings people are beginning to have about the Vietnam War, but his real concern is his disintegrating family. It's unmistakably the. Summer of 1969, but the people in the car could be heading West in a covered wagon or flying in a spaceship to a far planet. It's James Gordon Bennett's achievement that he has created an absolutely real family with its specific and universal problems and with all the immediate resonant horror and hilarity that come with consanguinity.