Event/Horizon
Cambridge, 1974 — astrophysics & poetry.
Event/Horizon is a richly observed, quietly elegiac campus novel that follows a single year in the life of Steve Percival, an intelligent but indecisive recent undergraduate, as he staggers — often lovingly, sometimes self-destructively — through the transition from studenthood to a precarious adult life. The novel traces a familiar but fertile sequence of rites of passage: the interview and temporary jobs, the exhausting labor and rituals of early‑morning milk delivery, the music, the parties, the making and unmaking of relationships, the attempt to produce a work of art that will justify a life. It is written with a warm and often slyly comic intelligence; it maps a social microcosm with affectionate cruelty and an ear for the idioms of an English generation caught between bohemia and professional ambition.
Steve Percival, a recently-graduated, young poet of modest reputation and fragile self‑confidence, arrives at the pragmatic problem that will drive the early novel: he must earn money over the summer and, unwilling to take the predictable graduate path into commerce, takes a makeshift job as a roundsman for the Co‑operative Dairy. That decision sequences the book’s rhythms: the milk round becomes both a literal regimen (4:30 starts, the logistics of crates and routes) and a narrative motor forcing him into the town and into contact with a wide sample of Cambridge life.
The story is grounded in four interlocking arcs: (1) the youthful, unstable romance with Angie Barrett — bright, privileged, heading to Edinburgh to start a PhD — who becomes the book’s clearest moral center and emotional barometer; (2) the passionate and destabilizing liaison with Ginny (Virginia Stern), a model/artist/queen‑of‑the‑scene who catalyzes Steve’s erotic life, challenges his loyalties, and ultimately abandons him; (3) the larger social world of friends (Alan, Harry, Jez, Rob), musicians (Jon, the Doodah Men), and mentors (Grace Mitchell, Dr. Doyle) who provide contrastive models of career, ambition and artistry; and (4) the inscrutable work in progress, the book‑length poem Event/Horizon, whose creation and revision operate as the text’s metanarrative, driving decisions, forging identities and, finally, functioning as the symbolic black hole around which Steve and others orbit.