The Red Squad

by E. M. Broner

E.M. Broner brings us a wonderfully comic and moving novel about the interwoven lives of a group of restless Midwestern grad students in the 1960s. Forty years later, gray-haired and spread around the country, they learn that they were under surveillance during their activist days. At the center is Anka, a lively professor at an Ohio university, who receives an unsolicited Freedom of Information file charting her younger life as part of an eccentric crew who came together around politics and passion. She's plunged into suspicion (who sent the file and why?), but also into rollicking memories of her compatriots in the "bullpen" of graduate school back in those days: Kevin, the sweet young priest in the process of formally leaving the church, who was her protector and secret crush; "The Farmer," the only married man among them; the gay poet named Noble and his intimate, Ron, the black professor of Victorian studies; the irrepressible Bernstein, who yearned to start again in the promised