Ed Morley has a problem. He has five days to pass Amherst’s comprehensive exam in Fine Arts or he won’t graduate. Ed spent the past four years majoring in frat parties and rugby scrums, and after failing the comprehensive once, the odds are against him. However, taking on an obscure office known as the Class Choregus may propel him to a successful graduation. All he needs to do is lead the senior class in song during Commencement week—simple enough if he could read a note of music or carry a tune! As Ed navigates his personal comedy of errors, the specter of the Vietnam War looms over campus and a feeble anti-war protest is catalyzed into a fullscale rebellion.

This is a tale of Eastern Seaboard colleges in the Sixties: fraternities, drinking, football, and scoring with “Beta honeys”—a world which is interrupted by the seriousness of the war in Vietnam. Even an apathetic jock like Morley is forced to consider his dilemma ina larger societal context.

If the boys of A Separate Peace and A Catcher in the Rye continued to college, this is the world they would have entered. The Class Choregus belongs among the fine comic college novels which reveal to us the flip side of our fantasies and dreams.