The El Cholo Feeling Passes

By Fredrick Barton

ISBN:0440-20077

Paperback $14.95

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Originally published in 1985, Fredrick Barton's debut novel, The El Cholo Feeling Passes, chronicles the turbulent relationship of Richard Janus and Faith Cleaver, students in the late sixties and early seventies. As they grapple with career choices, Vietnam, and the Women's Movement, they grow up with--and apart from--each other. Their move from the secure environs of a small midwestern college to the liberal climate of larger-than-life Los Angeles parallels the trajectory of their relationship--and their individual selves--as they are catapulted from the safety of their undergraduate experience into full-blown adulthood; that move also parallels a seismic social and political shift, as the staid and solid values shaped by post-WWII prosperity are challenged by a generation whose very future is threatened by an unpopular war.

The El Cholo Feeling Passes is a coming-of-age story, at once funny and sad, documenting the triumph and strife of characters caught up in a remarkable period in American history but serving also as a timeless metaphor for fleeting youth-and the often disturbing dynamics of romantic relationships.

The 2003 edition of The El Cholo Feeling Passes is the first in a UNO Press reprint line, UNO Press Classics.

PRAISE FOR THE EL CHOLO FEELING PASSES

"It's been called a kind of Fear of Flying for men but is more like a Big Chill without the posing and contrivance. In fact, it's not like anything except itself: it feels right, it rings true."
-- Saturday Review

"Page by page it's a winner, a great, wide, youthful swoop at reality that compares to visions of James Jones, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth. The El Cholo Feeling Passes is big-and very beautiful."
-- The Los Angeles Times

"The El Cholo Feeling Passes is required reading. As a history of malaise and fragmentation in one character's life, it is more than incisive. As a document of the hysteria following the Sexual Revolution, it is certifiably true. As an absurdist comedy it begs to be compared to Catch-22 or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
-- The Times-Picayune

"Little has been written on the male reaction to changing sex roles. The El Cholo Feeling Passes does so as art, not propaganda. For that reason, its vision of sexual strife should be profoundly disturbing to ideologues on both sides of the gender gap."
-- The Atlanta-Journal Constitution

"Honest, with a main line of heart and music."
-- Barry Hannah

"This excellent novel is The Way We Were for the Vietnam generation."
--Brandon Tartikoff

Fredrick Barton, an award-winning fiction writer and critic, holds a B.A. from Valparaiso University and did graduate work under a Danforth Fellowship, taking degrees from UCLA and the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Currently he is Interim Provost, Dean of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, where he teaches fiction writing and film criticism. He has written on film since 1980 for the New Orleans weekly Gambit and since 1989 for The Cresset, a national review of literature, the arts, and public affairs. Mr. Barton has also authored three other novels, A House Divided (currently available from University of New Orleans Press), Courting Pandemonium, and With Extreme Prejudice, as well as a play in verse, Ash Wednesday.