It’s tempting to dismiss this novel as a rougher, less technically accomplished precursor to Pynchon: the same paranoia, manic intelligence, and countercultural sprawl, only with less technical polish. Those criticisms are fair. What the novel possesses instead is immediacy, an immediacy so simultaneously authentic and ironic a retrospective novel like Inherent Vice could never grasp it.

Written in 1966, this novel was composed in the middle of a party everyone refuses to acknowledge is beginning to curdle. The novel vibrates with movement, insecurity, posturing, optimism in defiance of this. Hell, Fariña even admits it

“If I’d been into the Middle Ages, man, you know I would’ve gone looking for the grail or whatever it was got them hung up. And so would you, so don’t come on cocky. Everybody’s got his little search and yours happens to be internal, but I’m just not cut out for meditation, right? Don’t have the time, for one thing; this is a nervous little decade we’re playing with.”

Similarly, every character moves with the exaggerated swagger of someone convinced history has become interesting enough to deserve them. Everyone, Fariña most of all, is faking authenticity by riffing off folk songs, Marxist literature, Zen, sex, Kerouac, amphetamines, and whatever unholy source caught their eye.

Most novels about “youth” are wrapped in retrospective nostalgia. This one is too chemically overstimulated, too present for nostalgia. And yet the novel carries a strange half-awareness of the era's (and even the novel's!) future mythologization, as though the characters can sense themselves ossifying into symbols even while they are trying to live. That tension—the energy of youth fighting against the irony already calcifying around it—is what makes this such an extraordinary picaresque, and such a perfect campus novel.