Age of Ignorance: A Novel

From the winner of the Whiting Award, a debut novel following a pair of friends newly decamped to the Bay Area and their string of misfires and misadventures in pursuit of love, political integrity, a lease, and true countercultural living in the age of Obama.

Election Day, 2008. Forest is living in his mom’s basement in Silver Spring, wasting away at his dead-end job by day and watching YouTube and headbanging to Korn by night. It’s been weeks since he dropped out of his MFA program, and his heady undergrad days, whiled away amongst Pittsburgh punks, anarchists, and his best friend, Free, are a beacon ever receding into the past. But Forest has booked a one-way ticket with a plan to change his fate. As crowds stream into the streets in the wake of the historic election, he jumps on the Metro and, armed with his anarchist's antipathy, a thousand dollars in the bank, and the hunch that if true freedom still exists in America, it lies West—and that, in the company of brilliant and fearless Free, anything is within reach—he catches a flight to San Francisco.

Unfolding from these waning days of 2008, The Age of Ignorance follows Forest and Free as they build a new fate—pursuing political integrity, true countercultural living, artistic possibility, a lease, and god-willing, maybe even a punk princess to call their own. Careening from punk house to punk house; mutual aid cookout to romantic rendezvous; poetry slam to courthouse rally; sometimes in the same direction and at others in achingly opposite ones; Forest and Free stake their claim on a new horizon, as the country seems to be setting its eyes to a higher one of its own. But the demons of our time continue to rustle in the bushes; and when tragedy strikes in the early hours of the New Year, what can or cannot be evaded, and what battles have been won and which are yet to come, are thrown into sharp relief. Shot through with Elwin Cotman's signature “wry, earthy lyricism” (Whiting Award citation), The Age of Ignorance examines a pivotal moment in our country’s history through two of its most unlikely prophets.