In 1968, I lived in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, was graduating from the University of Pittsburgh and spend a lot of evenings at the Swizzle Stick, a place down the street that had a live band and a dance floor. I can’t for the life of me remember the band’s name, even though they played at my 21st birthday party, but I do recall that the lead singer was dark and moody and very very sexy. The Hour of the Innocents, by Robert Paston, takes place across the state, in the coal country of eastern Pennsylvania, and the college is the branch campus of Penn State, where “the college dumps third raters.” Still, when the pitch to review this book came in, I thought at the least, even if the writing turned out awful, it would be a trip down Memory Lane.

The writing is not awful. I could go through and quote any number of worthy passages. Like this description of Matty, the virtuoso guitar player just back from Viet Nam, who lives with his parents “in a company house in St. Clair, a town shit on by history….Matty’s mother was a classic, her torso a sack of coal. Even at the end of June, a black cardigan warmed a flowered blouse buttoned to the neck. Mrs. Tomczik’s graying hair was pinned to fit under a kerchief, and her cheeks had the suck that comes from discount dentures.”

The narrator of the story is the songwriter, Will,  younger than the others and an outsider because he is from “Pottsville, the county seat, which passed for civiliation. To them, I was the born enemy, with a name that wasn’t from Poland or parts east.” The rest of the quarter are Frankie, the red-haired lead singer, who “braced his fists on his hips the way Mick Jagger would” and Stosh, the drummer with a predilection for fancy shirts.

To read this felt like a trip to a place I sort of knew and a time I lived during,  but because it’s filtered through the masculine sensibility, it was also a world totally alien to me. I liked that. I don’t know how true it is, but things these guys did and said and wanted and didn’t made sense to me in light of the boys and men I’ve known over the years.

The actual story of The Hour of the Innocents is raw and hungry and ultimately tragic. If they made a movie of this–which I wish they would–it would definitely not be your typical paean to rock and roll. The Beatles made it out of Liverpool; the Innocents didn’t even get to Pottsville, really. Not so much a sad ending but a realistic one for the hundreds (thousands?) of bands that sought to make it in the ’60s. What happened to the band that played at the Swizzle Stick? I don’t know–and since I can’t remember their name, I can’t Google them.

Similarly, I can’t find any biographical material on Robert Paston, the author of the book. Except he did say this in the author’s note: “After she finished reading the manuscript of this novel, my wife asked, ‘Which sixties band did they sound like? Did you have a specific group in mind?’ The straightforward answer was that I heard the band as itself: The Innocents were the Innocents, playing songs I’d written many years before.”