The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 16 December 2022
by Paul Justison
We've said it before and we can say it again: "If you can remember the 60s, then you weren't there." This gets ever more true as the generation that made the 60s what they were becomes the retirement home set, as the memories fade into even more osbscure myth than the 60s always were anyway. (A corrollary to that is that if you critique a novel about its facts, you might not be remembering the 60s all that well, either.) There are, of course, numerous books about that time, many great ones, and even more of smaller, lesser-known efforts. There is a sprawling array of self-published memoirs from those who want to assert that they were there, without necessarily having a compelling story to tell. It was all just so significant to all of us. We can't let it go. Personally, this reader is drawn more to works of sixties history and fiction that were written at the time, or very shortly thereafter, because those works unwittingly also capture the energy of a language that has also since faded. More recent books tend to have an elegiac tone, which is all well and good for the nostalgia factor, but really, it's the immediate energy we'd rather be able to capture.
Enough of the memory has faded that a factual memoir, especially of those drugged-out times, is harder to capture. Make it a factual novel instead. Thus we have this novel from Unsolicited Press (a small but dedicated independent publisher) by Paul Justison, whose back-cover biography sounds a bit like that of his protagonist, Mark Stenrud. Like so many of his contemporaries, Mark drops out from a traditional life with high mainstream expectations and an abusive home environment (described in a non-linear narrative with chapters set in the late 50s), runs off to San Francisco in time for the Summer of Love, evades the draft, tries to make a go of it in the counterculture, and then returns to understanding that he has to make his way in this world by more conventional means. The book feels almost more like a memoir than novel. The memories, by and large, are vividly rose-tinted. Darker episodes have an almost off-hand lightness about them which ends up being portrayed as our hero's careless attitude toward danger. This doesn't quite come across through most of the book. The danger doesn't really seem that immediate, and the notion that the surrounding characters see all this about Mark isn't hinted at until late. Mark glides through a pattern of sexual encounters and drug dealing (and the occasional trip). The Haight scene, just starting to deteriorate by 1968, is still held together with sex and drugs. The women Mark encounters are very much available and though, again, the blurb insists on a more sensitive portrayal of women in the 60s, there isn't much depth to these characters. Their joy in sex is entirely shared with the men and it was that kind of free love fantasy that darkens some of the freedom of that era. But, what the heck, let's have a little fun, anyway. We're not here to solve the problems of the time. Rather, we're here to see what fun it could be. Until it isn't.