WE HAD IT SO GOOD by Linda Grant (Simon & Schuster), 336 pages, $28.99 cloth. Grant reads with Lev Grossman, Wayne Johnston and Gayla Reid on October 27. See listing. Rating: NNN
Linda Grant’s sly story of baby boomer hippies who grow up into near complacent adults starts out almost mean-spirited but does find some soul – a little too late.
Stephen, who grows up in California, the son of immigrants, heads to the UK on a Rhodes Scholarship, only to lose it when he’s busted for concocting LSD on school property.
But Stephen’s a survivor who remains in a hippie commune, eventually sharing a London sprawl with a bunch of anarchists and dropouts and finally buying it with his wife, Andrea, once his partner in anarchy, now a practising psychotherapist.
Grant, a former Orange Prize winner and Booker short-lister, creates rich characters. Especially vivid are Ivan, the trust-fund hippie, Andrea’s best friend Grace, who’s pathologically irresponsible and sponges off her friends, and Andrea and Stephen’s magician son and photojournalist daughter, both fascinating.
Grant writes some brilliant set pieces. A sequence in which Stephen brings his Brit bride back home to California is rich with detail that gets to the heart of her culture shock.
The problem with this sweeping story – it ranges from the 60s through 9/11 and up to the global financial crisis – is that it doesn’t take itself seriously enough. What promises to be a portrait of a generation that can never get satisfaction ends up undermined by Grant’s satire.
It’s possible to sympathize with characters who are the subject of the author’s ridicule, but Grant doesn’t quite pull it off – until the very end, when We Had It So Good does gather some emotional steam.
Even so, this is a very entertaining read.
