Christopher Church, having graduated from his Kansas high school and not sure what to do with his life, is a young man on the road. Much like in Jack Kerouac's seminal novel, Chris seeks to wander, to stretch the vast highways, and travel to faraway places, preferring a life of hitchhiking and camping out, a life free from any burdens. It's fresh into the decade of the 1960s in America, and Dahl’s expansive and impressive novel is situated within the cultural and political events that shaped the American decade: the tumultuous civil rights movement, the Kennedy assassination, the atrocities of Vietnam, and the growing disillusion of young people.

We learn of Chris' struggles, both in and out of college with his best friends Diek and Phyllis, his intermittent relationships with girls, and his participation in the civil rights movement when, as white man, he is beaten and terrorized by the KKK for his “Negro sympathizing.” But every chance he gets, he chooses to be again out on the road, taking in the pure experiences of hitching across the country.

Dahl has written a rather epic story of young love and of college life with its boisterous binge drinking and fraternity-house parties. Christopher and his group of best friends, like any idealistic young people—but perhaps accentuated by the significant cultural events playing out around them in everyday life—are ones to question, to fight out against the injustices they experience, and at the end of it all, to get cold stone drunk and pass out at each other's places. Like the many artists, social activists, and other revolutionaries of their time, in these young people's lives there is no doubt that the times “are a-changing.”

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