I have just finished reading the novel, The New Earth, by Jess Row. In many ways it is a mess of a book. About a dysfunctional family, one that the novel overburdens with not one trauma, but five. I won’t list them to avoid spoiling your reading pleasure. But let’s just say that it’s three traumas too many. And there is a jejune bit of meta-fiction (or postmodernist high jinks) running through the book, in which “the novel” announces its requirements in ways that add nothing to the impact or import of the novel.
That’s because, as is usually the case, the novel’s excellence comes from its portrayal of an array of characters and the ways in which they strive to navigate life in the United States from 1970 to the era of Trump. (There are some masterful meta-fictions in which character and mundane observation play no role. So I am not saying it can’t be done. But it is very hard to pull off, and most excellent novels do what novels have always done, dissect society through the travails of individual characters.)
To be clear: The New Earth is the best novel I have read recently. I highly recommend it, flaws and all.
A loud despair runs through Row’s book; by its end, the three children of the family have declared the US unlivable—and take their father off with them into exile. In one way, that’s why the multiple traumas are too much. We don’t need over the top horrors to understand why people suffer in the contemporary US. Enough to register the cruelties of everyday life—and the helplessness many of us feel about doing anything to remedy them. The most sympathetic of the novel’s characters is the daughter who works as a lawyer trying to help terrified immigrants in Trump’s America. We see how she is overwhelmed, with far too many cases than she could ever effectively handle, and fighting a judicial bureaucracy that even when it is not being deliberately cruel (which happens often enough) is battered into indifference by also being overburdened.
In short, the novel is just about the best account I have read of the pain and fear that comes from living in the contemporary world. The family’s other daughter joins a peace group trying to protect Palestinians from Israeli settlers, so the horrors are not confined to the US.
Not surprisingly, the novel has nothing to offer in the way of solutions—except finding a separate peace. The characters leave the US in search of that peace, hiding out from history as it were, and tending to their own gardens.
Which leads me to the 1970s. The parents of the dysfunctional family spend a fraught few years in the middle 70s in a Vermont commune presided over by a Japanese Zen master. The novel does a marvelous job capturing the spirit of the 70s—which was a decade of separate peace making. The failures of the revolutionary, transformative hopes of the 60s yielded the small-scale, personalized experiments of the 70s. I know that’s a cliché, but Row makes it take on flesh. The search for alternatives was real—and while never a mass movement, it did motivate a fairly large sub-culture.
And Row’s novel ponders why it all fell apart. Why, as if determined to show Margaret Thatcher was right when she declared there are no alternatives, a belief in other ways of living, in an ability to create and sustain those other ways, just dissipated, leaving nary a trace behind. It all just disappeared: the hope, the experiments, the conviction that mainstream society was not just cruel, but fully and truly insane. The determination to have no part in that insane society–and the various ways people actually acted on that determination. Not some fantasy of moving to Canada, but setting out to establish communities where a different life could be lived and sustained. The novel’s ending–with its surviving characters going into exile–both reprises the 70s despairing conclusion that only a separate peace is possible with the added despair of not even believing one can, with friends, create the place of that separate peace. No running away to create a community, just running away, is all we can manage to imagine (and sometimes, although rarely, do) in the 2020s. After all, how many people really do move to Canada?
I graduated from college in 1974 and immediately started grad school in the fall of that year. I didn’t know anyone who was dropping out to pursue some utopian alternative. My fellow students at Georgetown were disappointedly conventional and conservative. No doubt most of them voted for Reagan a few years down the road. The atmosphere at Buffalo was entirely different. I had traded conservative kids from Northeastern Catholic high schools for Jewish grad students, a surprising number of whom were “red diaper” babies. From being just about the most radical kid on campus in DC, I went to being a boring middle-of-the-roader in upstate NY.
Grad school in Buffalo during those years was a mess; apparently its teetering on the edge of anarchistic chaos was the after effect of its actually having been mired in anarchistic chaos in the years from 1968 to 1972. A kind of fragile order had been restored, but there was still a lot of pulling in various contradictory directions, basically filling the whole spectrum from the Trotskyite Sparticus revolutionaries to the careerist academics on the faculty and in the grad student ranks. The careerists were on the defensive and a distinct minority in Buffalo. It wasn’t until I got to Berkeley in 1977 that I encountered true academic careerism in all its tedium and stuffiness. The kind of place where people would not venture an opinion because something “was not in their field” and where obsession with the “profession’s” pecking order, both locally and nationally, was as pronounced as any minor Austen character’s constantly reaching for his Debrett’s.
All of this to say that in Buffalo one could imagine that academics was itself an alternative. Having one’s cake and eating it too. Certainly that was the case for me. After all, I ended up in Buffalo halfway by mistake. I would have gone to Yale or Cornell if they would have had me. I did know that Buffalo was at the forefront of “theory”—in which I was interested. But I would have gone to deadly conservative Minnesota if they had given me a better stipend. So I wandered into the Buffalo anarchy with only the dimmest idea of what I was getting into.
But I had been reading the various radical tracts of the 60s—Marcuse, N. O. Brown, Charles Reich, Philip Slater. So I did have the image of books that could intervene in the here and now, that were promoting alternatives, that were paving the way toward a transformed world. So I was primed already to think I was preparing myself to be a similar kind of prophet, one who mobilized ideas to move the world forward.
I think it is that image of an audience that meant I could never have fled into a commune. Prudence no doubt also played a huge part. I wanted/needed a job, a sinecure if you will. Already in 1974 the American Philosophical Society was warning prospective graduate students that their job prospects were iffy. A professor of mine at Georgetown ran into me the summer of 1974. When he learned I was going to grad school, he advised me to learn a trade—carpentry or electricity—along the way, so I would have something to fall back on. A far different take (and a more refreshing one) than my encounter in 1978 with one of the Berkeley professors I had gotten to know. I told him I was doing adjunct work for $900 a course at the University of San Francisco while I looked for a tenure track job. What kind of tenure track job, he asked. In my dreams, a liberal arts college. Well, he replied, have you contacted Reed?
Back to prudence. I couldn’t step off the pier into the unknown of a commune. But I also couldn’t do it because I wanted to address the world. I wanted to be a writer and I wanted an audience. So I needed to believe (and it proved, eventually, approximately true) that the academy would afford me the freedom and autonomy and financial means to do my own thing, to pursue what interested me and what I thought should interest (and influence) others. There was a long apprenticeship, with freedom only coming after tenure, but the academy did deliver something like an alternative way of living—even if the dreams of influencing others, of contributing to a transformation of America life, did not (could not?) come to fruition.
Thus, my own 1970s hopes were dashed; the robust goals of dramatic change scaled back to the miniature spaces of the classroom and the family. Even my efforts at transforming academic culture came to naught. I spent most of my academic career at UNC trying to break the strangleholds of departments and of individually conducted research in how the university organized itself and how faculty experienced their careers. To no avail. Nothing I did in that regard had even a minimal impact.
True, UNC is a particularly conservative place. True interdisciplinary structures and fantastic collaborative work have been introduced and have flourished in other places. But I couldn’t get UNC to move in those directions. I had plenty of co-conspirators (so my use of “I” here is misleading), but we failed.
In other words, I ended up with my own separate peace. I had a more than satisfactory career, in terms of loving my students and the classes I taught, in terms of writing what I wanted to write to the best of my abilities, in terms of the respect and regard of my students and colleagues. But nothing I did made any difference in terms of providing alternatives to the way life is organized and lived in the US. I could only watch—as so many of my generation did—while the dominant mode (call it “neoliberalism” if you will; I have called it “the return of ruthless capitalism”) only tightened its grip on every corner of the world.
That tightening grip somehow—and this is where Row’s novel is very strong—also obliterated the pockets of alternative communes and their like. Somehow? After all, what threat were a few scattered dissident communities, far from the mainstream, tiny in their numbers and their power? Yet they, too, had to be driven into the maw. Swallowed whole and made extinct.
How? Part of the story is the inflation of the late 1970s. It is hard to convey to people today how cheap life was in the early 70s. My grad stipend was $270 a month; if you were paying $75 a month for rent in Buffalo in 1974, you hadn’t looked hard enough. If you had no income, no steady job, you couldn’t expect raises that at least took inflation into account even if lagging behind. Things that could be done for almost no money in 1972 (like finding a place in the country and scraping by on what you could grow and casual labor) were impossible by 1978. Poverty—real, soul and body destroying poverty—drove people off the communes as the decade unfolded.
There were multiple other causes as well. But I want to return—and end—with this question of audience. The communes were always, to some extent, demonstration projects. They were meant to prove to a skeptical world (which, in reality, might shrink down to skeptical parents and other family members) that an alternative was possible. But you couldn’t go into a commune unless you also had very strong ties to your fellow communards; they were the audience you were most cathected to.
That’s where I didn’t have it. I was cathected to the imaginary audience of readers. Those were the people I wanted to address. I had turned my back on my parents, had succeeded to a large extent in not caring a whit if they approved of what I was doing or not. We didn’t share any values by that point; they were Catholic Goldwater Republicans. My only retained inheritance from them was a strong commitment and emotional attachment to monogamy. I had no interest in or sympathy for 70s sexual experimentation or revolution, although very sympathetic with both feminism and the gay liberation movement.
In any case, I was not attached to a local audience or community. The lack of such ties meant setting off into the woods with a small group of like-minded others was never a possibility for me. But, inevitably, the courage and romance of that attracts my admiration. And the failure of those efforts both disheartens and intrigues me. Why couldn’t they by sustained? And why, today, have we gotten to the point where such utopian efforts don’t even exist any more? A total loss of hope—and of vision—and of deep attachments to a cadre of others.
We are thrown back on the family—or on church communities. There is almost nothing else in the way of lived solidarities out there. Especially if we think of institutional supports for those solidarities. Yes, there are networks of friends, but never organized into ways of life, or (perhaps more radically) ways of sustaining life, of securing the basic necessities. For that, you must go to the market; you can’t provide them for yourself through a small-scale collaboration with friends.
That’s what the demise of the 70s spirit means. Experiments are no longer even tried. Everyone buckles under to the imperatives of the marketplace and to the intolerances of a society that scorns all alternatives and punishes those who, for whatever reason, cannot manage or refuse to bow to the demands of the market. A society that visits the economic sins of the fathers on their offspring, making it well nigh impossible to climb out of the pit of poverty.
So, yes, I miss the 70s with its sense of possibilities. I was mostly a by-stander to, not a participant in, its experiments, which does seem a lamentable prudence. But I was a fellow traveler in the sense of being a sympathizer. I wanted the experimenters to succeed. I hated the inevitable smug “I told you so” that followed the multiple failures. I could mostly overlook the experimenters’ excesses and their often ludicrous rhetoric in order to honor their courage in trying to forge a new path. And I can feel very melancholy when I read a novel like “The New Earth” and experience afresh the hopes that drove so many 70s alternatives and the eventual crushing of those hopes.
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