Synopses & Reviews
"In 1970 I realized that the Sixties were passing me by. I had never even smoked a joint, or slept with anyone besides my husband. A year later I had left Nicky, changed my name from Ellen to Rain, and moved to a radical lesbian commune in California named Red Moon Rising, where I was playing the Ten of Hearts in an outdoor production of Alice in Wonderland when two FBI agents arrived to arrest the Red Queen . . ."
So begins Blanche McCrary Boyd's brilliantly raucous account of self-styled feminist outlaws, their desperate adventures and extraordinary fates. Ellen, the narrator of Boyd's previous novel, The Revolution of Little Girls, this time pierces the heart of the sexual revolution in her quest to find a woman hero or--by default--to become one.
Ferociously paced, Terminal Velocity delineates six wonderfully engaging characters: Artemis Foote, for whom being rich, talented, and beautiful is a kind of game; Jordan, a messianic fugitive who becomes Ellen's lover; Amethyst Woman, a Marxist/Leninist dentist; Ross, a red-diaper baby and now a columnist for Ramparts; and Pearl, an art history professor turned hippie. At the center of this vortex is Ellen, prior to her transformation happily married and a rising young editor at a genteel publishing house in Boston. Together with these women, she is caught in the political and moral tailspin of the Sixties, living in a sexualized world-without-boundaries that leads them, eventually, to destruction, acceptance, and even redemption.
Deadpan funny and exquisitely moving, Terminal Velocity brings Boyd's lyricism, humor, and depth to material largely unexplored in American literature.
Synopsis
Can a nice plantation-bred Southern girl find her destiny as a radical lesbian and sometime fugitive? Well, yes, if the girl is Ellen Burns and the author is Blanche McCrary Boyd. In this wickedly transgressive new novel, Boyd follows the heroine of The Revolution of Little Girls through the warped looking glass of the 1970s, with results that are by turns funny, sexy, and terrifying.
In the course of Terminal Velocity, Ellen goes from an apartment in Boston to a commune in California; from editing cookbooks to mixing psilocybin cocktails; from a more-or-less satisfying heterosexual marriage to an incendiary affair with a woman terrorist. How Ellen discovers who she is makes Boyd's new novel a Fear of Flying in free fall, featuring the most resilient Southern belle since Scarlett O'Hara.
About the Author
The author of three novels and a collection of essays, Blanche McCrary Boyd is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Connecticut College.
From the Hardcover edition.