The Hard Rain

"Luke meets Michael Lieber in late-1960s college--and he immediately feels inferior to Michael's Jewish, darker, crazier, more risky intensity. And after graduation, flat-narrating Luke marries Grace and gets a job as a journalist ("That summer Grace and I were married. We moved to New York and I got a job as a reporter on one of the wire services") while Michael, moved to Detroit, works on the assembly-line of an automobile plant, organizing--or trying to--the workers on behalf of a splinter radical group that's going nowhere. After a bombing of company headquarters backfires (a night-guard is killed, Michael, implicated but not physically involved in the bombing, goes on the lam, fleeing Detroit by taxi for New York--where, the string played out, he finally kills himself. Luke, feeling more inauthentic than ever compared to Michael, starts a magazine article about his old friend's life and death; but he finally gives it up, the past too painful. "--Kirkus.