'True Believers' impressively links the 1960s and today

"If you remember the '60s, you weren't there," Robin Williams often joked.

But in Kurt Andersen's new novel, True Believers, the '60s are a totally memorable and pivotal decade after which nothing was ever the same. Especially for main character Karen Hollander, who was there. And it's what she can't forget that fuels this intelligent and insightful coming-of-age flashback into an era so often undersold for being all about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Yeah, it was that . . . but so much more.

You see, Hollander is a 64-year-old diabetic grandmother, a respected attorney, former senior federal official, and, in the novel's 2013 setting, dean of UCLA's Law School. Not bad for a former anti-war stoner, except she recently withdrew her name from consideration for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Who does that? Not someone who just didn't inhale. Someone with a deeper and darker secret that has ripped at her conscience for more than 40 years.

Now Hollander is picking up the pieces of her patchouli-scented, war-protester past to write a tell-all memoir, or, as she puts it, "to come clean about my own secret episode of 1960s berserkery and lost innocence."

Hollander and her closest friends, Alex and Chuck, grew up in early-'60s, affluent suburban Chicago, a normal childhood back then watching civil rights riots, the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War on TV. Precocious nerds, they re-enacted elaborate James Bond scenes until it seemed too uncool in high school. They went to Harvard, she went to Radcliffe. And, as those Ian Fleming pre-pubescent fantasies festered into ideological radicalism, the plot thickened, as they say.

They enlisted in the anti-war movement, did sit-ins at the ROTC building, smoked dope and dropped acid, and became militant existential renegades conspiring to commit a crime of hallucinogenic proportions — for the common good.

Think The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Atonement, a '60s-era female Holden Caulfield hearing the beat-beat of The Tell-Tale Heart. Then try to remember who Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are, and you'll have some sense of this story which is part period piece imbedded in a time when ZIP codes, The Pill and free love, draft dodging, Woodstock and napalm were all new and happening. It was a time when metaphors seemed more real than reality, when the world was shattering.

The best-selling author of Heyday and Turn of the Century, Andersen is an agile storyteller, alternating convincingly between Hollander then and Hollander now. A cultural historian, he doses these pages with factual relics and emotionally accurate depictions of life and events in the '60s.

The novel is not a whodunit because we know who did it, but Andersen builds suspense by not disclosing what Hollander did until nearly the end. While Hollander is reassembling the skeleton in her closet, Andersen interjects judgmental, witty, occasionally even profound observations about the '60s and today — impressively spanning two distinct yet linked eras.