Introduction
"Tomorrow is too important to be clouded by yesterday," says Guy Morrison in this story of a modern young couple attempting to discover themselves in a complex, anxious world. Self-discovery has become an important factor in our contemporary society, and, as the protagonist here suggests, our yesterdays play a subordinate role to our tomorrows. This is as true in sexual behavior as it is in every other facet of our complex lives.
In Pursuit in South America the author gives us a secularized view of individuals struggling through inadequate pasts toward uncertain futures. These are not members of the "lost generation" so evident in every decade of our immediate past. Rather, they are both victims and combatants in a series of revolutions blowing through our complex society today.
Both Guy and Sandy, for example, are caught in the vortex of the sexual revolution. Both have highly limited sexual experience and virtually no sexual education. They come together in marriage in what could be described as the classic situation where they are expected to "work things out" on their own.
Author Karl Van Husen suggests that this couple might very well work things out sexually, provided that they are completely free of outside pressures. He also shows us that such a situation, while perhaps desirable, is virtually impossible in our contemporary society.
This is accomplished through the use of symbolism. Guy Morrison, like the average American male, is married first to his occupation. Because this came before his marriage, it remains the strongest life goal in the earliest stage of his marriage. The suspense and adventure of his assignment on his honeymoon, that the author suggests several times in the narrative, could very well represent nothing more consuming than commuting to work at home. The important point is that his work, a hunt in Latin America, is the ruling force in his behavior, and he only changes his pattern through a series of dramatic incidents.
Sandy, on the other hand, represents many of the modern American females who assert their independence by earning their own living and then are faced with a radical transformation in marriage. This is a transformation that the woman must make almost alone, and this is emphasized here when Sandy finds herself all alone on her honeymoon in a foreign country. The men she seeks for solace and self-discovery are nothing more than meaningless characters that flash briefly through her life, touching her, yet unable to reach her.
It might be said that the sexual escapades developing in Pursuit in South America is an argument against, and a parody on, the morality of our previous generation of Americans. By burying sex and denying sex education, could society expect any more than what happened to Guy and Sandy? Isn't the situation described here the cause and effect relationship of a sexual morality out of tune with the time?
Critics may say that the sexual activity in relation to the time span here is exaggerated, but would it make any real difference if all of this happened over a period of months or a year instead of in a few days? The cause and effect remains the same, and the discovery itself would be the same. Indirectly, the author pleads for understanding of a basic human problem against the backdrop of a society going through a drunken acceleration of pressure.
-The Publisher