Porter Shreve's latest novel, "When the White House Was Ours," is an odd stew of nostalgia and affection, condescension and judgment. It begins in 1976. The narrator, 15-year-old Daniel, moves with his mother, father and sister to Washington, D.C., where his father plans to open an alternative high school in the large but dilapidated house of the title.
They are the family we recognize from countless novels: wacky and creative, always teetering on the precipice of financial ruin. Mom and Dad have teaching degrees, but they have lived a peripatetic life, and Daniel has little faith in this latest venture. Dad's heart is, as always, in the right place, but the realities of money, recruiting and the landlord's demands are not part of his vision. Throughout, Daniel acts as the more mature man of the family.
Enter Mom's brother, Linc, his wife, Cinnamon (nee Cynthia), and Cinnamon's lover, Tino. They have escaped from a failed commune, older but no wiser, driving across the country in a VW bug covered with ads for Salem cigarettes. Obviously they are on the lam. And the free love they proudly espouse leaves Linc unhappy and sullen. They represent the end of the '60s era hippies, and the trio is portrayed as pathetic and ridiculous. They decry "The Man" and use Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" as their bible. They have no compunction about stealing or lying to get what they want, but in this whitewashed tale, they operate in only the friendliest and nonviolent of ways.
Will the school succeed? Will Mom and Dad divorce? Will Linc and his cohorts get arrested and ruin everything? These are the questions that keep the plot moving forward. There are laugh-out-loud scenes and wonderful passages about nuns and teenage sex and dumpster diving. Shreve is a good writer with many strengths. His previous two novels, "The Obituary Writer" and "Drives Like a Dream," were critical successes, but in those books, his characters are subtler and his stories more complex. The cast here borders on cliche: the Republican landlord, his rebellious daughter and particularly Quinn, the homeless black boy who becomes like one of the family.
