In reading this passage during his Wisconsin Book Festival on Saturday, novelist Anthony Grooms offers a subtle hint of the great social, political and cultural upheavals revisited in Bombingham, his novel of the Civil Rights movement. Listen carefully to the last line, and you can hear the foreboding with which he punctuates an apparently innocent scene. The short video follows below.
Framed by the context of the Vietnam conflict, Bombingham is a novel that is not so much about innocence lost as constitutional morality sought -- and, perhaps, found in some imperfect or incomplete form -- in a republic that was never all that innocent to begin with.
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