Double Double

Meet Seth Evergood. Distinguished author, lecturer, and split personality. On the surface, he appears to be a dedicated, conscientious, and “liberated” man of the 1960s left. On the inside, however, Seth is deeply confused, disillusioned, and conflicted about his actions and his very existence. Sometimes the only things that keep him going through the day are drugs, psychoanalysis, and an alarming desire to actually believe his own florid rhetoric. The clash between his inner and outer selves leads Seth Evergood into a dangerous covert adventure on the fringes of radical politics. It is a quest that could end in revolutionary glory or in a big bang.

In this, his fourth novel, Jose Yglesias takes on the iconic images and cliches of the 1960s Black Panthers, third-world guerrilla movements, student riots, “consciousness-raising” through drugs and sex, hippie communes, and Flower Power, and puts them all into overdrive. The result is a near-surrealistic perspective on an era that, torn between adolescent naïveté and “by-any-means-necessary” absolutism, went haywire. You’ll do a double-take reading Double Double.