Just Finished Reading I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier

A couple of weeks ago while in Lexington, Kentucky we paid a visit to their Peddler's Market, a regional chain of flea markets presented on a higher, more customer-friendly level.  I found there an old paperback book, I Am the Cheese, by Robert Cormier, read the back accolade (School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, 1977) and picked it up, having just finished reading it.  It belongs to the "young adult" genre of fiction, and vividly reminded me of what was in vogue in film during that era.  We're talking about films and books full of devious government "deep state" secret and ruthless organizations preying upon innocent Americans, depriving them of their civil rights and even killing them should a decision come down from the top...The Parallax View, Marathon Man and Three Days of the Condor immediately come to my mind.  In I Am the Cheese, a teenage boy, Adam Farmer, finds himself desperately riding his bicycle down treacherous roads in rural Massachusetts to find his father, who he thinks is confined somewhere in southern Vermont.  Interspersed with the narrative of his adventures are sessions of him as a sort of patient/inmate being interviewed by a man calling himself Brint and being fed drugs whenever he gets too anxious as he describes his life, families, friends, enemies, and the special circumstances that had resulted in him being here.  The author presents it all as a mystery...one which is resolved at the book's end.  The question is whether an ordinary citizen can live a life of integrity and decency and, when presented with a tough decision, be able to rely on his government to back him up.  The answer in this story by Cormier, known to have written some pretty depressing books, is a resounding NO...which shouldn't surprise anyone recalling the culture of suspicion and conspiracies popularized in the kinds of movies I mentioned earlier. Somebody I know talked to me about this book many, many years ago but I forgot who...I just know that it came out after I finished high school.  But it's clearly the kind of reading I suspect many, many school kids from that time were assigned in English classes.  I'm not knocking the story per se, but the narrative here...along with the stuff coming out from other sources...fed into what I think eventually caused a groundswell of popular cynicism about government and its intentions: demagogic political outsiders, I believe, like Ross Perot and Donald Trump, would later manipulate that negative feeling to their advantage...