Difficulty at the Beginning Book

John Dupre is an honors student at West Virginia University, dressing up as a Beatnik cowboy, the folk-singing "resident outsider" before nonconformity became a youth uniform. Morgantown centers on John and his "out-crowd" friends: Bill, the sharp-shooting Zen Buddhist Harvard scholar; Marge, the political radical with Nefertiti eyes; and William, the scion of old money who has the world on a platter and can't think of a single thing to do with it. John's girlfriends and sexual obsessions bring endless reflections in a hall of mirrors that threaten to draw John into its vortex.