Set during the Cold War of Jimmy Carter's presidency, Jennifer Gilmore's second novel is the mostly successful story of a Jewish family, the Goldsteins, affected and disaffected by the politics, fashion and trends of the times.
The United States is still mending itself after the end of the Vietnam War. Iran holds Americans hostage. After the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, the Carter administration calls for an ill-advised grain embargo against the USSR, and it announces the U.S. will boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow.
As political and social trends in the U.S. in the 1980s continually change, so does the Goldstein family. Sharon, the mother, has given up her '60s protest days for a life as a dinner caterer to the Washington wealthy and powerful. She's married to Dennis, also a spirit from the '60s, who now works for the Foreign Agriculture service. His job often takes him to the Soviet Union.
Dennis and Sharon cater, if you will, to this '80s way of life, but Sharon still puts up a fight. She belongs to LEAP!, a cultish support group. Both regret never becoming the full-fledged hippie activists they might have been. Their son, Ben, once a high school jock who dated cheerleaders, is now hip, acid-dropping Benji. He's in his first year at Brandeis, home of political protesters, including Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman. He's looking for an important cause to protest, but settles for protesting America's planned boycott of the Olympics.
Vanessa, Benji's sister, has gone from being a naïve schoolgirl who listened to the Carpenters to sometime punk rocker, sometime Straight Edger (a punk subculture that embraced clean living). Grandpa Sigmund is a socialist, nostalgic about mother Russia and Trotsky, and a protester role model to Benji. Sigmund is married to seemingly harmless Tatiana from St. Petersburg. To Dennis, she seems the embodiment of Russia.
Characters are developed in a leisurely, but sometimes painfully slow way. We learn about each through slow-moving flashbacks, half scenes and shifting points of view. Sometimes the story gets bogged in rather mundane character portraits, but "Something Red" is something you should read.
