Vietnam War era

The Vietnam War era is a remembered political backdrop in the novel, invoked through William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s history as a protester and the unrealized prospect of campus unrest at West Central Pennsylvania University. The era matters less as a chronology of national events than as a measure of the distance between political expectation and local experience: Railton saw no significant protests, yet the possibility of them occupied Lou Steinmetz’s imagination, and Devereaux later recognizes the familiar language of protest in a new cause.

Anticipated unrest at Railton

When Devereaux arrived at the university in the 1970s, with long hair and a beard, Lou Steinmetz watched television reports of unrest elsewhere and prepared for trouble on the Railton Campus. Years later, in the early 1980s, Lou showed Devereaux a detailed contingency chart, even though the campus had experienced no significant protests against the war. The plan mapped blocked entrances, designated the southern ball fields and tennis courts as a National Guard assembly area, and directed troops west toward the track and grandstand, which would serve as a makeshift holding pen. Lou’s eyes were still animated by the scheme. Devereaux punctured its imagined drama with the observation, “But there were no riots.” The gap between the elaborate plan and the absence of the event gives the period a distinctly local shape: national conflict enters Railton through television, preparedness, and memory rather than through a campus uprising.

Protest remembered and repeated

The Vietnam War era also belongs to Devereaux’s personal past. At a later protest against the killing of campus waterfowl, he points to a young demonstrator holding a STOP THE SLAUGHTER sign and tells Missy Blaylock that he once carried a sign like that during Vietnam. The reference establishes continuity between his earlier protest experience and the campus’s current demonstration, but the causes and setting have changed. Missy replies, “Some things never change,” treating his recollection as agreement; her remark helps persuade him that it is time to leave. By then, demonstrators have linked arms in a semicircle around the ducks and geese and turned their chant toward him: “STOP DEVEREAUX. STOP THE SLAUGHTER.” Finny, the goose, breaks through their protective line. The scene makes political memory immediate and uneasy: Devereaux recognizes a familiar form of protest, but he is now its target rather than simply a former participant recalling his youth.

Decades of missed chances

The novel places that political memory within a longer history of unrealized possibilities. After leaving Tony Coniglia’s house, Devereaux reflects on colleagues who, like him, once believed they were made for better things. They have spent their academic careers at West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton, where everyday contact with one another also confronts them with paths not taken. Finny did not finish his dissertation. June Barnes received a job offer from a decent university after publishing a well-placed article, but Teddy Barnes had just received tenure, and the other institution would not hire him as part of a package. Later, June talked Teddy out of an administrative opportunity that might have benefited him and his students. Gracie DuBois’s poetry, too, once showed promise. Devereaux sees the long passage of time not as a single lost opportunity but as the accumulation of choices, constraints, and reasons for staying; the colleagues have become more willing to blame one another than to confront their own possible responsibility.

Aging and the passage of time

The Vietnam-era recollection sits alongside the novel’s attention to later stages of life. Devereaux’s arrival at the university more than twenty years earlier becomes one measure of how much time has passed; a summer reflection then frames the end of a recognizable phase of his life. At fifty, he loses a tennis match to Julie Devereaux, a defeat he had postponed for nearly a decade. In the same summer, he voluntarily moves from left field to first base after jogging through the spring in an effort to keep his former position. The change is practical—his speed is declining, while a younger player can improve with experience—but it also registers as a concession to age and diminished possibility. When Tony, preparing to spend a year in Pittsburgh as a sabbatical replacement, describes a warrior’s recognition that he no longer has his best strength, Devereaux’s reply corrects the example rather than accepting it smoothly. Across these episodes, historical time, institutional time, and bodily time accumulate without resolving into a simple lesson: the past remains present, but recognizing what has passed does not mean that its meaning has been settled.