Ventura and Winnetka
Ventura and Winnetka are locations in Southern California, where this rollicking coming-of-age novel is set in 1978. J.G. Bryan does a great job of evoking the time and place—and the psyche of a teenage boy—as we follow Douglas Efron, age seventeen, through his senior year at Woodrow Wilson High School.
As the year goes by, he careens through a set of adventures ranging from puppy love to near-death experiences, somehow surviving heartbreak, academic ups and downs, cocaine, basketball defeats, fights with friends, extreme drunkenness, divorced parents, benighted coworkers, a trip to the Manson family house, the death of the family dog, and the infidelity and possible pregnancy of his girlfriend.
One of the most entertaining aspects of the novel is the constant flow of historic pop culture references—perhaps especially enjoyable for a reader who also lived through the era of Garfield telephones, gas crisis lines at service stations, and disco. A soundtrack of contemporary music plays in the background: Bruce Springsteen, the Sex Pistols, and Blue Oyster Cult. Douglas wears Adidas Superstars, watches Saturday Night Live, and sees Superman. He drives off to the prom in a borrowed “rad cherry-red 240Z,” wearing a pale blue tuxedo and accompanied by the pretty, perfidious girlfriend (who is also, he finally realizes, dumber than a head of celery).
By the time Douglas hops into his brown Civic and heads out of the San Fernando Valley and off to San Diego for work and college, he may not have come anywhere near “of age,” but he has moved a few inches in that direction. His story is lively, profane, ribald, touching, hilarious, and ultimately uplifting. Someday, maybe in five or ten years, he’ll be a grownup.
