American Sycamore

A moving novel about the devotions of friendship and the power of love to heal, American Sycamore celebrates the American experiment and the importance of giving a damn.

Friends since their college days, Rob, Julia, and Ray are boomers who set out in their twenties to make things right in America. A couple since law school, Rob is a distinguished Constitutional scholar at Harvard and Julia a prominent journalist writing a book about the wreckage of the nation’s political life, while Ray serves as dean of the medical school. Ray’s work as a physician in a Vietnam combat zone left him scarred yet with a powerful and loving commitment to heal and to support his friends through tragedy. Together, they’ve accomplished things that matter—in the public square and in medicine.

Yet,  in contemporary America, they still have some hard lessons to learn. After the New York Times publication of the 1619 Project, Rob finds himself out of step with critics and his students, but his and Julia’s secure world is truly shaken by a diagnosis of prostate cancer that will require medical intervention—releasing memories of another time when their lives were turned upside down. Meanwhile, when Ray learns that the hospital and school he has devoted his life to may have betrayed patients and the medical community, he must choose whether to take up again a fight he has waged all his life against the worst impulses of big institutions.