The 1980s

In the novel, The 1980s are recalled less as a settled historical panorama than as the setting against which the narrator measures a private coming-of-age. Their public landmarks include the 1987 stock-market boom and crash, the continuing Iran–Contra affair, and a television culture he finds increasingly empty. At Princeton University in Princeton, that sense of cultural drift becomes personal: the narrator feels his generation has missed its defining moment, distrusts the university’s traditions, and eventually falls in love with Laura Baines. His recollection of the decade is therefore both social criticism and a record of intimate change.

Public spectacle and a sense of belatedness

The narrator opens his account of 1987 by setting national events beside the beginning of his own emotional story. For many Americans, he observes, the year meant a stock market that rose spectacularly before crashing, the Iran–Contra affair continuing to trouble Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and the arrival of the television soap The Bold and the Beautiful. For him, it becomes the year he fell in love and discovered that the devil exists. The contrast makes private experience no less consequential than headline history, while the ominous reference to the devil gives the year a darker significance that the account does not yet fully explain.

His wider picture of the decade is shaped by comparison with the 1960s and 1970s. He sees the earlier decades as having possessed conspicuous historical drama: the sixties brought music, marches, the summer of love, drug experimentation, Woodstock, and contraception; the seventies saw the Vietnam War end, alongside disco, flared trousers, and racial emancipation. By contrast, the eighties seem to him uneventful and belated, as though his generation arrived after the moment when history was being made. He imagines Ronald Reagan summoning the spirits of the fifties, while money displaces other ideals and free enterprise becomes a kind of national hymn. This is a sharply satirical interpretation, not a neutral account of the period, and the narrator later allows that his bleak vision may have been partly self-made.

University life and social alienation

The narrator has been a student at Princeton University in Princeton for a little over three years when the events of 1987 unfold. He lives in an old building on Bayard Lane, between the art museum and the theological seminary library. The house has a living room and open kitchen downstairs, with two double bedrooms and adjoining bathrooms above; McCosh Hall, where he takes most of his English courses, is a ten-minute walk away. These practical details locate his student life in a specific, walkable landscape, even as he tries to spend as little time on campus as possible.

He remembers university society as a performance of inherited identities. He joins academic societies, a well-known eating club on the Street, and the amateur actors of the Triangle Club, but finds little genuine rebellion in the poses adopted by his peers. Princeton traditions, in his view, have become play-acting emptied of meaning. He also regards many professors as mediocre and sees the students’ political identities as constrained by class: wealthy self-styled Marxists and revolutionaries read Marx, while conservatives imagine themselves heirs to the Mayflower settlers. He believes both camps look down on him, one as a member of a despised petit-bourgeois class and the other as a white-trash outsider from Brooklyn. Yet he qualifies the indictment himself, conceding that this hostile picture may exist largely in his own mind.

That qualification connects his campus judgments to his ambitions as a writer. He had begun imagining a writer’s life in high school and, under the influence of Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo, cultivated a gloomy, skeptical outlook. He believed that authentic authorship required sadness and loneliness, and used Job’s suffering as an imagined model for literary greatness. His alienation from Princeton may thus reflect not only the institution he observes but also the persona he has learned to construct for himself.

Writing, habits, and life beyond campus

Writing gives the narrator a purpose distinct from the social rituals he distrusts. He keeps his grades around the B range, passing exams without difficulty so that he can make time to write. On an old Remington typewriter repaired and given to him by his father, he produces dozens of short stories and begins a novel that lasts only a few chapters. He repeatedly rereads and revises his work, but most of it ends in the trash. Discovering new authors often leads him to imitate them without realizing it. The routine presents writing not as effortless self-expression but as ambition repeatedly checked by revision, discarded drafts, and uncertainty about finding a voice.

His weekends offer an alternative geography to the campus. He returns to New York, browses second-hand bookshops on the Upper East Side, attends obscure plays in Chelsea, and hears Bill Frisell, Cecil Taylor, and Sonic Youth at the newly opened Knitting Factory on Houston Street. He also visits cafes on Myrtle Avenue and crosses to the Lower East Side to eat with his parents and younger brother Eddie, who is still in high school, at family-run restaurants where patrons know one another. These habits place his cultural life among books, experimental performance, music, and family ties rather than within Princeton’s formal traditions.

The narrator’s distance from the decade’s countercultural image is personal as well as intellectual. He tried marijuana at fourteen, sharing two joints brought by a boy named Martin with five or six other students during a class trip to the Botanical Garden. He recalls the episode as a frightening brush with criminality, not as an initiation he enjoyed. He smoked a few more times in high school and became drunk on cheap beer at a couple of parties in shabby apartments on Driggs Avenue, but found no pleasure in either intoxication or getting high. He studied hard, earned top marks, and received offers from Cornell and Princeton; he chose Princeton, which he considered the more progressive option. The contrast between the era’s remembered experimentation and his own abstention complicates any simple portrait of him as either a rebel or a conventional student.

Television, Laura, and the private turn of 1987

The narrator’s contempt for much of contemporary television is another part of his account of the eighties. He dislikes political debates, risqué jokes, and B-movies featuring plastic-looking teenagers, and imagines the remaining serious producers and journalists as dinosaurs sensing the end of their age. He had little reason to watch television until Laura Baines entered his life: she liked nightly junk television, explaining that it helped her mind sort and store the day’s accumulated information. In the autumn of 1987, he therefore watches more television than ever before, slumped beside her on the couch and commenting with her on talk shows, news, and weekly dramas. The shared habit turns a medium he dismisses into part of their companionship.

Their first meeting is ordinary and specific. One October afternoon, he returns to the shared house and finds Laura in the kitchen, trying to squeeze mustard from a tube without removing its foil seal. He takes off the seal and hands it back; she spreads the mustard over a jumbo hot dog she has boiled. The small practical exchange becomes the beginning of a relationship whose importance the narrator understands only retrospectively. Laura does not mention Professor Joseph Wieder until Halloween, while they are watching Larry King Live, where Wieder has appeared to discuss drug addiction after three young men died of overdoses near Eugene, Oregon. She describes herself and the professor as good friends. By then, the narrator says, he may already have been in love with her without knowing it.

The decade in this recollection is consequently marked by a double movement: a public world the narrator experiences as stale or absurd, and a private life acquiring unexpected intensity. Television, campus routines, music, and writing establish the texture of his days, but the kitchen encounter and the shared couch give those routines a new emotional center. The eighties are not presented as a complete account of American life; they are the period through which this narrator remembers his skepticism, his self-fashioning as a writer, and the moment when love begins to unsettle both.