An Open Universe

by: Matthew Arnold

Published by: Wheatmark Publishers

Reviewed by Patty Inglish, MS

Four college men graduate from Cornell in 1979, before the Internet and gadgetry swallowed America. After growing up into career seekers, they part with sadness and a hope that their plans to reunite regularly come to fruition. With best intentions, they travel to the corners of America and away from one another.

While a familiar tagline suggests that the quality of life’s journeys surpass its goals, the accounting differs from the usual in that it demonstrates how a goal can mutate, move, or become swallowed whole by avalanching sands of a shifting lifescape.

Matthew Arnold’s characters feel solid as they experience college dilemmas that faced many in the 1970s and 80s. These are the difficulties of career-oriented learning, campus mores, politics, recession, alcohol and drugs, relationships, insecurities, irreparable mistakes, and loneliness in a fracturing society, but all with a sense of independent goal-setting and wonder.

Figuring out relationships, and which ones deserve our time and essence, are important in young adulthood. People get hurt. Stan, three college mates, and two very different young women attempt to face up to these impasses to find opportunities that sometimes lie hidden, even when in plain view. Some attain peak experiences early, while others continue to search.

As in reality, one applies his education with good results, having thought it might never apply anywhere. Two others reach some success, one over-enamored of money, while a forth remains firmly rooted in the metal-music culture. At the end of short reunions and much travel, a coffee house may offer peace as Stan moves over 3,000 miles across the nation and up and down mountains, both internal and external

The story is worthwhile and engaging, despite grammatical problems, and profanity is saved for the most intense moments. Alcohol, drugs, and sex are major elements in the story, but not overdone or graphic.

College freshmen and sophomores can identify with this story and use it as a frame of reference for the future.

Armchair Interviews agrees.