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It is the summer of 1965. The assassination of
JFK has left John Dupre—and all of America— with Lyndon
Baines Johnson, “that Southern asshole” with a public
persona cut from an old rock and roll song: “I RIDE FROM TEXAS
TO ENFORCE THE LAW.”
It’s oppressively hot, the kind of heat that
makes it practically impossible to do anything, or even think straight—and
if John’s brains aren’t addled enough by the temperature,
there’s the endless obsession with girls—the persistent
problems of his old flame Cassandra Markapolous and her younger
sister Zoë. There’s also the massive Civil War novel he’s
been studiously not working on. And to make things worse, LBJ's
starting to call up the reserves. This is John in that gruelling
summer waste land, “a fat, broke, horny, unem-ployed, draft-eligible,
Buddhist Confederate,” who, if he doesn’t do something
drastic, is going to find his fat, broke, horny ass shipped overseas
to get it shot off.
Lyndon Johnson and the Majorettes is a
delightful performance, a crackerjack novella that works on multiple
levels, as intoxicating as a mint julep and as tightly wound as
the spring in a homemade time-bomb.
"Difficulty at the Beginning … four
well-crafted, handsomely produced novels … follows protagonist
John Dupre from his high-school years in the late 1950s through
the early '60s counterculture to the late '60s, when Americans who
didn't agree with the Vietnam War but got drafted were faced with
the major ethical dilemma of their young lives."
— Vancouver Sun
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