'Riders on the Storm' by Susan Streeter Carpenter

Review by Ed Davis

Tet. Chicago. Martin. Bobby. Che. Mao. Daley. Stokes. SDS. Weathermen. Many of us will receive a mild jolt if not electric shock at those names. They’re not neutral for anyone who lived through the 1960s, experiencing the upheaval over everything from Vietnam to capitalism’s worst excesses. This is the social-emotional territory of Susan Carpenter’s fine new novel, Riders on the Storm. While relating the tumultuous events of 1968, Carpenter’s near-documentarian style as well as absolutely believable characters makes the book a deeply rewarding experience.

She nails down the convergence of historical events, both national and international, that produced the Movement, fed it, and then finally splintered it into rival competing groups. Countless books and movies have mined this vein, but the magic—and power—of doing it through fiction is to make the political achingly personal, allowing us to suffer (and rejoice!) right along with people we can fully relate to, even love. Her point of view characters include increasingly revolutionary Ivy Barcelona, who, before the book’s over, winds up with a bomb in her hand; her would-be-pacifist boyfriend Chuck Leggit; and Jane Revard, friend and ally to welfare mothers, whose radical politics turn her toward feminism. Several others round out this group of young radicals. Bert Augustin is a sexy Che Guevara, whose violent militarism sets him apart from the others. Marvin Kaminsky is the father figure of this loose family which comes together in an attempt to change their world.

They never become stereotypes. Although Jane increasingly relates to women who love other women, she’s neither a lesbian nor a man-hater. Ivy, though naïve, is both sexy and sexual and must learn to push away from love when it stifles. Jane, who would be Plain Jane in the hands of a lesser writer, is a creation of great complexity in Carpenter’s: daughter of formerly radical parents who allowed their political activism to be crushed by the Rosenbergs’ execution, she turns her back on their passivity in order to choose her own hard path.

With this family, the author takes us on a journey through the past, where we’ll live—or re-live—the Columbia strike, the March on Washington and a lesser-known eruption that occurred in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood. During a shootout between police and a militant black radical group, Chuck, Bert, Jane and Ivy wind up caught in the crossfire, raising the specter of violence that will haunt the Movement and these characters’ lives during the next few months. But the immediate effect is to motivate these budding radicals to put everything on hold for their beliefs.

Although we all know the eventual outcome of the Movement, the author creates a great deal of suspense concerning what will happen next to our “family.” The one national event Carpenter develops fully (and terrifyingly) is the demonstration at the Chicago Democratic convention, which matures the Movement at lightning speed. With “the whole world watching,” our heroes take us directly into the heart of chaos, where heads are bashed and horrors await any female unlucky enough to be jailed. However, we also experience transcendent solidarity with Ivy and her fellow activists inside Grant Park at the end of an historic day.

While Carpenter makes us care deeply about the country’s agonizing struggle that Vietnam so symbolized (to overcome the military-industrial complex, racism, poverty, inequality and entitlement), I cared even more about these characters growing their identities in such fraught, unprecedented circumstances. They portray the daily schizophrenia of participating in demonstrations that could land them in jail or the emergency room by day, and composing absurd academic exercises by night, as Ivy does, on “teeth as harbingers of death” in Thomas Mann’s fiction. Chuck is perhaps the most torn of all, working in a bank by day and drafting poignant letters to the draft board during his hours at Movement headquarters.

By book’s end we see the serious consequences of their choices and sacrifices; and while the Movement eventually gave way to the excesses of the Reagan ‘80s, most of these characters survive to become . . . us. Readers who lived through these times will be tempted to assess what and who they became in the wake of such cataclysmic events; younger people who have been exposed to the countless I-was-there accounts of their elders can experience for themselves what these courageous (confused, overly-idealistic and very human) twenty-somethings went through—and why. Ultimately, the value of the Movement, Carpenter suggests, might’ve been to produce more an inner than outer revolution. “Resistance is now vast and huge,” Carpenter writes in the introduction to Part Five. “We are still here.” Indeed, many of us helped elect Barack Obama.

This book is no fabrication but a fictional recreation by one who was there, who doubtless has some Ivy Barcelona as well as Jane Revard inside her. Riders on the Storm can be purchased for $18 locally at Dark Star Books or ordered directly from Bottom Dog Press (P.O. Box 425, Huron, OH 44839).

Photo by Wendy Hart Beckman