Set in the 1960s and 70s, Bare Roots is a coming of age/coming out novel about a sensitive, intelligent boy, Justin Crystal, up to the age of nineteen. Justin´s whole life is a cycle of anticipation, fulfillment and disappointment, joy and agony, as he struggles to find out and accept who he is.
When Justin is seven, his father asks his mother, Harriet, for a divorce. Not long afterwards, Justin and Harriet move from Wisconsin to Southern California, where Justin is surrounded by adult women: his mother, his grandmother, and his grandaunt. Eventually mother and son move to Long Beach, where Harriet has a job and meets Gerald, also divorced, whom she marries after dating a long time. Although Gerald becomes Justin´s stepfather, Gerald never accepts the role of father for Justin.
Throughout his life, Justin has a series of close male friends, from whom he is separated for one reason or another. With each of these friends he shares a private world, but as an only child, he learns to live in his own fantasy world, reading books, listening to records, particularly the Beatles, and playing the piano. Fundamentalist Christian religion becomes an important influence. It provides a few social outlets and a Biblical education, but also it creates a lot of guilt, frustration, and confusion, especially about sex.
Justin vacillates between desires for both sexes, but when he moves away to Southern California Baptist College, in San Diego, he has a passionate but chaotic affair with his roommate, Russ. Despite their intense relationship and potentially destructive environment, they are lovers throughout the school year till both are injured in a motorcycle accident. While he is in the hospital, Justin discovers Russ has apparently taken up with another young man. When he returns to his Long Beach home, Justin attempts suicide while his mother is in the hospital having a baby.
The events of the novel are those Justin imagines as he swallows sleeping pills and Valium. While characters´ thoughts are freely given, especially those of Justin and Harriet, the reader never knows for sure if these are the actual thoughts or only those Justin, or the narrator, imagines. What the novel reveals are the roots of a young life, as it were, laid bare and, like roses planted with bare roots, ready to grow.
