The novel’s protagonist is named Sergio (a moniker given to him by his Mexican American father); he’s known as Serge. When still a child in 1968, he and his older sister, Angela, are brought by their mother to Central California in search of “the Big Sur experience” (Big Sur being a place where, supposedly, “people can be anything they want to be”). Young Serge’s imagination is filled with the possibilities of the rivers, canyons, beaches, redwoods, and mountains: “I could run wild wherever I pleased,” he thinks. But eight years later, in 1976, these fantasies have soured, dashed by his seemingly inescapable daily reality of poverty and abandonment. His mother has given herself over to an Indian religious cult called Elemental Consciousness, “one of the many Asian cults that had come to America to cash in on the counterculture’s infatuation with exotic alternatives to western-style religion,” leaving Serge unsupervised and unmoored, working low-paying jobs and feeling trapped. He takes solace not in the drugs that so many of his peers are using, but rather in his prized possession: an electric guitar, which he loves playing in unconventional ways, “hitting a big distorted chord and letting it wash over me like rain from heaven.” He has sex, joins and leaves bands, and falls headlong in love (with Melinda, a ticket counter worker at a theater in Cannery Row), but as he faces the prospect of friends leaving town for colleges and careers he can’t afford to pursue, he decides that “if I didn’t start living dangerously I’d never get anywhere.” His dream is to go to New York City and break into its music scene.
The fact that the dawning of this dream is deferred for over two-thirds of the novel might have been a severe detriment in the hands of a less talented writer, but Fairbank depicts all of Serge’s teenage misadventures with such immense readability that the narrative flows effortlessly along. The mood changes from dangerous (on his first hitchhiking venture, Serge is picked up by “a flat-out psycho” and only barely escapes) to melancholy (“the wind was howling like an animal in pain,” reads one passage; there “was a feeling of the Twentieth Century being stripped away,” reads another) with an ease that feels effortless. Serge provides a unique perspective; he doesn’t drink or smoke, and so is jokingly viewed as a “narc” by young peers of his who do virtually nothing else, and the sadness that has shaped him is never far from his character. At one point, his absent mother sends him a note complaining about the cost of forwarding his magazines—“what a pal she was,” he thinks bitterly. “Strange to have your absentee mother tell you in writing that you’re not even worth the price of a handful of stamps.” The story can occasionally hit repetitive notes (Fairbank specifies many times that young Serge is always hungry), but readers will harbor such a strong hope that Serge will eventually escape the “lot of trouble” his life sometimes seems to be that they won’t begrudge the multiple reminders of his vulnerable humanity.