Sinopsis

A midnight train tears through the Midwest carrying Jake Smith back to Sandburg, Illinois, and to his peculiar, yet beloved group of college friends who have remained in the town. But Jake is not merely returning to the scene of his college years, he is attempting to recapture the past itself?embodied in the glamorous Jesse Gray, the handsome, hard drinking, drug loving Neal Cassady-like townie who galvanized their generation, and whose existence was pivotal to Jake?s discovery of love, of sexuality, and of himself. Can Jake succeed in his madly romantic quest? Can Jesse possibly live up to his remembered legend? Can memory and desire become one? Moody, retrospective, steeped in the everchanging colors of heavy rock music, hallucinogenics, and sex, Mad to Be Saved is a compellingly written contemporary novel of the ?Seventies college generation which resonates with the themes and ideas found in the classic authors of the ?Lost Generation? of the Twenties and Thirties? Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe?for whom the question of whether we can ever go home again was central. Mad to Be Saved is the second novel by Kevin Esser, whose best selling Streetbov Dreams was praised for its honesty, subtlety and strength in narrating the relationship of a thirty-five year old teacher and a thirteen year old Hispanic street tough. For many readers. Mad to Be Saved will be a revelation of their own past, for others a recreation of those swirling, heady days of early manhood and of that first passionate relationship which can never be forgotten.