December 2015: All Our Yesterdays (Tarloff)

Post date: Dec 14, 2015 1:9:30 AM

Quite a large group of alumnae managed to escape being rained on as we trekked up to Nancy's house for our December 10 meeting to discuss Erik Tarloff's novel, All Our Yesterdays.

Before getting into our book discussion we were delighted to welcome Susan back to the East Bay and the book group, and to welcome Sarah, a new face to our group as well.

This book's roots are so tied to Berkeley in the late sixties that we started off by discussing who was living here at that time, and various people shared recollections of the period. We also pondered what made Berkeley such a hotbed of counterculture and activism, and were reminded by Kate of the roots of the Free Speech Movement, which began in 1964, when students at Cal protested a ban on on-campus political activities (oops--that ban sure did not work out the way the administration hoped). We discussed also the role of women in the movement, which seemed remarkably submissive, and the role of the pill in the spread of sexual liberation, leading in turn to the women's rights struggle of a few years later.

We did eventually turn to the book, although frankly, we found it hard to stick to it and kept wandering off on tangents. Most readers found the plot device of seeing Molly and Zeke as a couple in modern time was very effective in drawing you through the story from the past. Maggie felt Zeke was way too long-winded and all that analysis of every situation made her crazy. Others did not mind, and after all, he does warn the reader in the beginning that it is what he does. We pondered the question of change: are we the same person as we were 30 years ago (as Zeke claims) or are we different? Does Zeke's character actually develop in the story? Many felt that he had a rather 45-year-old outlook even when he was in college.

Susan was struck by Colin's embrace of violent struggle, and specifically his endorsement of the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. She felt she could sort of understand the desperation that might lead somebody to join a jihadi movement, but had a hard time understanding somebody like Colin feeling that such a massacre was an acceptable act.

Most of us were a bit bemused at someone writing a story so specifically set in Berkeley, with no explanation of what or who all sorts of local locations and characters are. For us locals, references to Willie Brown and Michael Krasny are no problem, but what about if you are not from here? Karen countered that when she travels to a new city, she often goes to a bookstore and asks for the best local novel, seeing it as a way of getting to know a town from the local point of view. This novel certainly has that quality, and I think most of us had fun with the local references.