Back in school again, the boys and their pals long for a continuation of the rompings and excitements of summer. They fasten on a quixotic quest: to go to "war" with four old men—Bleak, Gray, Quartermain and Braling—once the young boys convince themselves that the old people—all old people—are part of a conspiracy to steal the natural immortality of youth.

So the boys launch themselves at the porch-sitting oldsters, Doug firing a cap gun at Braling, whose weak heart promptly and fatally gives out! In the confusion, Doug also knocks Quartermain down with his bicycle and breaks his leg. The war is fully on, and the remaining elders—who seem at times indeed complicit in a sour conspiracy of time theft—are fully engaged as well.

Doug and Tom try to stiffen the resolve of their soldiers. They visit a haunted house. They swear off sweets, like Spartans (this resolve lasts all of two hours). They mount a raid on the chess sets of the elderly. In their finest moment, they attack with firecrackers the courthouse tower clock, that symbol of the passage of inexorable time. The oldsters retaliate with truncated school vacations and canceled festivals.

Comes a moment of détente, at a birthday party thrown by Quartermain for a young girl named Lisabell. There Doug and Quartermain experience a mutual moment of satori, each briefly inhabiting the other's mind, and the war is over. But Quartermain cannot resist one more frightening sally: an exhibit of freaks for the boys, driving home the horror show of mortality. But Doug is rescued by a strange transfer of life force from the old man to himself and embarks on his maturation.

Wasting the Dandelion Wine

Bradbury's new novel is a pendant to the classic it hangs from. If it existed solely on its own merits, without reference to its predecessor, we'd call it a neat little exercise in allegory, a spare, occasionally vivid tale, with bite and whimsy, satirically illustrating the generation gap between the very young and the very old. Bradbury's prose, although stripped down by the writer's own advancing years, remains supple and possessed of color and vivacity, his sense of plotting antic and mischievous. So far, so good.

But the original novel was so much more than this limited outing that Farewell Summer can only pale by comparison. Moreover, it in some ways betrays and muddies the American Zen teachings of Dandelion Wine.

A "fix-up" composed of stories hailing from 1946-57, Bradbury's autobiographical novel still ranks right up there with such eternally relevant evocations of American life as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938) and Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1945). It plumbed the depths of growing up and growing older—amid the mystical workings of nature, space and time—with multivalent wisdom, refusing to settle on or endorse any one dogma—unless it be simply "see, feel and appreciate." (Really, a writer's credo, and Doug was plainly a budding writer.) By sharing the narrative point of view among many characters other than Doug, it achieved a panoramic perspective. It had a beautiful central symbolism for the powers of memory in its notion of bottles of wine that contain the days of summer in each sip. And, finally, its language was ornate without being overblown.

The new book features a simplistic dichotomy—old versus young—which is carried to extremes not seen in the first book, where the motif popped up at times but was ameliorated by intergenerational sympathies. Bradbury seems to realize he's undercutting his earlier, more subtle themes when he has the boys puzzle about whether their beloved grandparents are evil, if all old people must be. The template of war between the generations is a harsh one, which forces Doug to be peevish and querulous. He's nothing like the budding Buddha of Dandelion Wine (although Tom remains a little truer to character). Sure, you could chalk it all up to turning 14 and undergoing a confusing sexual awakening (Quartermain's climactic conversation with his penis and Doug's with his own organ, as they experience a transfer of libido, is plenty weird, and not necessarily in a good way). But there's just no sense of continuity with Doug's course of maturation as exhibited in the first novel. Lyricism is fled, and suddenly the world is a staler, harsher place.

Perhaps you really can't go home again, to cite one of Bradbury's admired mentors.