The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 3 June 2009
by Michael Weiss
American culture has, like it or not, dabbled in the concept of communal living ever since the earliest days of this country. So, during the 1960s and early 1970s, years of upheaval in global culture, certain social experiments were undertaken during that were really quite consistent with American cultural experimentation all the way back to the beginning. But, we were coming off a long stretch of fairly conventional social structures in the 1950s that many people saw as psychologically constricting. Probably, true. Anyway, many in the sixties generation (now in their sixties) saw themselves as breaking free of American traditions when they chose to experiment with communal living. Many of these communes went bust in a short time, swallowed up in interpersonal battles over politics, drug use, communal ideals, and sex. Some of these groups, however, have managed to survive. Those are tied together by some common ideal, religious or otherwise, or they adopted some pretty nitty-gritty practical ways to function in a world often hostile to their way of living. Anyway, the writings of these communards is often full of bombast, political naivité, youthful ideas of complete freedom and, ultimately, frustration. This book, however, has a very journalistic feel to it. Its author, Michael Weiss, was married with a child when he and his wife chose to join several others in a communal living arrangment in a large house in Pittsburgh. They didn't live on a farm, in some funky cluster of run down shacks, but lived what we might now consider fairly conventional individual lives in an urban environment. Several held solid middle class jobs. Others were into political organizing, but politics was not the driving factor in their group experiment. Weiss goes on to describe how the members of the household found new ways to interact in this extended family. Many had to break from their very conventional nuclear family upbringing. Money and sex seem to have been the biggest issues in their weekly meetings. They pooled half of all their income into the house and it sounds like it worked fairly well. When members wanted to leave, though, the tension surrounding the interviews of new family members is palpable in the text. The writer is conscious that this way of life isn't for everyone, and that it would sound very unusual to the average reader in 1973, but today it doesn't seem so crazy. There are, after all, many successful intentional communities out there. But has it become a core alternative in our culture? Probably not. Weiss was trained as a journalist, and there is a slightly impersonal style to his writing. He is certainly not given to the flights of hope and political certainty that one finds in other books of the time about other communes. So the story is fairly dry. There isn't a lot of drama, though there is tension throughout. Often, it sounds like a big group encounter session, very in-touch with their feelings in a strongly self-conscious way. It is hard to discern, really, the appeal of their lifestyle, if so much of it involved so much navel-staring. Still, it is one of the more sober depictions of the communal spirit of the sixties.