Foregone : a novel
(Book)

A septuagenarian leftist documentary filmmaker gives a last interview from his mythologized life to a former star student to whom he discloses his experiences as a draft dodger who fled to a new life in Montreal.

At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and exstar student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fifes wife and alongside Malcolms producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.