The Girls by Emma Cline

The Girls by Emma Cline
Disturbing and patient portrait of a young woman who falls prey to a Manson-style cult in Califoria in the late sixties. She is exonerated of any murder charges, but becomes a minor public figure. In the novel, she reminisces about the steps in life that took her to the Ranch and got her ensnared in the cult.

The novel was well written, gripping, just lurid enough to be mildly titillating and deeply sad.

I read in the Times that Ms. Cline has been engaged in a fairly nasty series of lawsuits against an ex-boyfriend, with whom she lived while writing this novel. He has alleged that she cribbed some of the material in this novel from his work and that she “hacked his email.” While I know nothing about this case, I will say that I’d be absolutely shocked if this novel had been written by a man. It just rings too true with the awkward experiences that I suspect characterize girlhood.

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

Stone chronicles the depressing collapse of the sixties and the morally bankrupt characters in his novels always remind me of lost children wandering around the remains of a birthday party that ended hours ago because their parents never came to pick them up.

Dog Soldiers tells the tale of a heroin smuggling deal orchestrated by two former marines still living in Vietnam. They return to the US with more smack than is good for anyone, and they draw a collection of their former lovers and friends into the messy deal, which ends in ruin for almost everyone. This is all set in California, the canyons of LA, the mean streets of Oakland in about 1973. Peace and love have died, and only sex and drugs are left. There’s a sense of intense paranoia, as if everyone might be running a number of some kind. (And most people are.) Our characters are all awash in philosophies, from zen to… weirder stuff. But none of them are able to really pursue enlightenment of any kind, because they are all too drug addled.

Ultimately, this is Stone’s message in Dog Soldiers: That the movement(s) of the sixties got sidetracked, trying to take shortcuts, or becoming wrapped up in hedonism, and ended up missing the more high minded, spiritual targets they initially sought in the communes and San Francisco gatherings of the mid to late sixties. What remains is a sticky criminal residue of paranoia, psychosis, and social fragment. It’s a message we hear at the end of Easy Rider; (“We blew it.”) and hear echoed in A Scanner Darkly.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

“Will you come home to me on the Smile?”

Didion, sixties counterculture chronicler and maven chronicles the year after the death of her husband with heartbreaking detail and a vivid ability to recollect the hardest parts of life.

This is likely as essential a book for the now withering Baby Boomer generation as was Slouching Towards Bethlehem fifty years ago. It’s a heartbreaking mediation on marriage, aging, and the lonliness of widowdom. I’m not ashamed to admit that I had tears in my eyes and had to stop reading several times.

My good friend KM tells me that the tragic footnote to this tale is that Didion’s daughter, QR, did not actually make it through her illness after all, and died some months after the publication of the book. This makes even the small ray of hope offered at the memior’s conclusion fade out and disappear.

Read this book if you are a Baby Boomer with a spouse. Eventually, one of you will lose the other. The Year of Magical Thinking may help in some small way prepare you.

Read this book if you have parents who are Boomers. You will lose them eventually too.

Read this book if you’re human and care about other people in your life. As another sixties counterculture icon warned us long ago, “No one here gets out alive.” Plan accordingly.