How do we find our way in life when so many things seem to be conspiring against us or limiting our choices? This insightful, sometimes heartbreaking, and often hilarious novel takes up this question from multiple characters’ perspectives. Each of their stories offers a nuanced exploration of a particular existential struggle and where it might lead, for good and for ill.
The novel is set in Rhode Island, in 1967: a year of turmoil in the United States and in the lives of the young people at the heart of the story, who must also confront daunting challenges closer to home. Tino Battuta faces judgment from his family–and possible conscription into the Vietnam War–after leaving medical school. (Whether he flunked out or was kicked out is a matter he cares not to discuss.) His girlfriend, Primrose Tirocchi, an emerging artist, is subject to regular emotional abuse from, and judgment by, her mother. At the same time, Primrose is struggling with mental illness, the worst effects of which are always threatening to surface and spiral out of control.
There’s also Lupo Light, a doctoral candidate in astronomy at a local university. Standing between Lupo and his PhD is his dissertation advisor, Peregrine “Perry” McKee, who seems far more interested in investigating purported UFO/extraterrestrial sightings by local citizens than in reading Lupo’s dissertation. (These citizens happen to be women whose husbands have been called up for the war.) When McKee asks Lupo to help with these investigations, Lupo believes that despite his considerable skepticism, he must play along if he wants to get his degree. Another big reason for Lupo’s cooperation: McKee secured him a draft deferment.
Lupo’s and Primrose’s storylines intersect when they both attend a meeting of Students for a Democratic Society, and soon romantic sparks fly between the two. (During the meeting, a subcommittee is formed to look into whether the group should extend membership to “all sentient beings including those that, in theory, might someday arrive from outer space.” Throughout Ready, Set, Oh, talk surrounding the UFO sightings, and efforts to try to connect with extraterrestrial life, inject a generous dose of humor into the novel. But there are lots of really funny moments in the book outside of the UFO-related scenes.)
After Primrose becomes pregnant, life gets a lot more complicated for her and Tino. Among other challenges, they must figure out whether to get married–not an easy decision given that neither one of them has felt wholly enthusiastic about that prospect. There are also Primrose’s feelings for Lupo.
Through much of the novel, two other major adversaries of Tino and Primrose are familial and social pressures and expectations. Josefowicz portrays these difficulties, and how Tino and Primrose confront them, with insight and feeling.
Tino’s departure from medical school is a source of shame for members of his family, who’d taken pride in the prospect of him becoming a doctor, with all of the social status that would have conveyed. For his part, Tino believes that his life choices have narrowed considerably:
Tino’s friend Chick also faces the possibility of being drafted, and the two of them ponder escaping to Canada by boat. With such a mission in the back of their minds, they end up purchasing a beat-up Chris-Craft and trying to make it voyage-worthy.
As for Primrose, she faces both the judgment of her mom, Louise, and also the limitations placed on women–and mothers in particular–at the time of the novel. Louise is the opposite of compassionate when it comes to Primrose’s mental illness. According to Primrose, Louise believed “that a nervous breakdown was just what happened to girls like Primrose, who slept with their boyfriends because they did not love their mothers. Filial impiety caused premarital sex, which was a pathogen, and that was that.”
Later, as Primrose progresses through her pregnancy and then becomes a wife and mother, seemingly marooned in the suburbs, she (rightfully) resists social and familial pressures to focus on housekeeping duties. Given these limitations on her life, she must cope with the grief over having had to give up on certain dreams, such as living as an artist and possibly showing her art in New York. And she is not sure that she will ever complete her college studies or finish a collection of observations about love-related matters, The Book of Love, that she’d been working on with a friend. (Extracts from this book appear throughout the novel.) At one point, Primrose observes that “she was now on another path entirely, her life hemmed up as neatly as a pair of her father-in-law’s trousers.”
Eventually, the novel leads to crisis points for Primrose and Tino, and for Tino and Chick’s plans to escape the war. (As for Lupo’s research mission for McKee, it leads him to some unexpected places, literally and figuratively.) Not wanting to give too much away, I’ll just share some feelings that I took away from how Primrose and Tino especially try to grapple with their biggest challenges: that sometimes, hope–even just a glimmer of it–can be gained by trying to resist the forces opposing us, even if one of those forces is a government that’s trying to send you off to a war that you oppose. At the same time, to paraphrase one of Primrose’s observations from The Book of Love, there are limitations to the power of love, an emotion that our culture tends to overburden with unreasonable expectations.
Returning to the opening question of this review, it is of course unanswerable. Or, rather, the answers we come up with are typically just provisional, helping us get our bearings before we can move onto the next challenge or uncertainty. One of the great pleasures of this poignant, funny, and sharply observed book is witnessing–and feeling–the characters’ struggles for their own best answers. Though the novel is set more than fifty years in the past, these struggles feel ever-relevant.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Stories about family conflicts
￭ Explorations of societal expectations/pressures placed on women in general and mothers in particular, especially in earlier decades
￭ Coming-of-age stories
￭ Historical novels, especially those set in the sixties
