Proles
A novel by BARRY BERGMAN
“Bergman delivers a shaggy, political coming-of-age tale that begins as an intellectual epiphany and slowly hardens into a heat-blasted story of industrial labor.... His story succeeds by capturing the smell of hot copper, bad coffee, cheap speed, and expired utopias...”
“The story wears certain influences openly, drawing on Ken Kesey, Thomas Pynchon, and Hunter S. Thompson for its bleak, scorched earth-style depiction of the death of post-'60s American idealism.”
—Kirkus Reviews
(Read the full review here)
Simon Bussbaum’s a film junkie without a cause, a spiritual drifter looking for light in a long-ago time of social tensions, cultural turmoil, political paranoia, and criminal conspiracies in high places. Inspired by a McCarthy-era reenactment of a triumphant miners’ strike—and freshly liberated from Nixon’s draft—he flees Queens for the Arizona desert, eager to join American workers’ march to the promised land of liberty and justice for all.
But his working-class hero’s journey veers wildly off-script. Instead of the “marvelous adventure” trumpeted by his new proletarian bedfellows, he tumbles headlong into a long, hot summer of hard labor, toxic masculinity, unrequited love, and unexpected insights into the power—and perils—of myth.
A few places where you can order a copy:
“The smelter... was a cavernous, ramshackle Big Top featuring spark-spewing furnaces, splashing cauldrons dangled from cranes like murderous marionettes, rapids of liquid fire tumbling down in harrowing dayglo ribbons. Danger was everywhere, lurking beneath the dull roar and the rotten-eggs stench. Everything black and orange, darkness and firelight, a waking nightmare Halloween.”
“Was the party just mimicking rigor mortis, possum-like, till conditions improved? Could it be that decades after Stalin was denounced, by Khrushchev no less—after the Beats, the FSM, Abbie Hoffman, Tim Leary, Martin, Malcolm, Bobby and Huey, the Beatles and Dylan and Janis Joplin and Gracie Slick—people here in America still pledged secret allegiance to Gulag Joe and his joyless proletarian wet dream?”
Bergman Reads (Again)!
“He had to remind himself he could leave whenever he liked.
He was, after all, a white man, more or less, in America…”