He's Come Undone

Contemporary Bill Lingstrom has experienced the male requisites of divorced parents/2 marriages/2 divorces/ 2 children, and at the age of 42 finally has to come to terms with the pain of all his losses. He has to laugh to begin the tears process, so He's Come Undone becomes a tragicomic look at growing up in the 60s and 70s (with the Cleavers as parents), and a portrait of a man very much in a love/hate relationship with his parents and very much in love with his children, healing from the loss of all four of them. The protagonist remembers comically the joys and terrors of boyhood in the two-parent middle-class subdivisions of the 60s followed by the light of post-Woodstock teenage hippiedom in mid-America darkened by the pall of Vietnam. He talks about the confusion wrought on males by the fairer sex as they grow up. As the protagonist remembers growing up and getting his first jobs after college, he begins to analyze how messages from American culture (men must be successful, must be sports jocks, must be tough, can't show emotion) have caused him to lose his bearings. In the present day of the novel (1998-99), Bill comes to terms with his past, his losses, and the messages that have driven him to divorce, loss, and distrust. He's Come Undone brings Bill Lingstrom, the Huck Finn of the baby boomers, full circle out of his hole. A true picture of America, Mr. Hanson's prose is clear and "...Billy watched with a smile as Larry baited a sucker too drunk to win anything shooting pool while at the same time smooth-talking a pretty blonde wearing a black cowboy hat and boots and leaning against a table. Billy finally walked back to the game. Larry had the wizened lines on his face and about the edges of his eyes of someone who had spent many years working outside, but beneath that hardening the more imperceptible ones of someone who saw the horrors of Vietnam, and has neither forgotten nor remembers."