This summer marked the 40th anniversary of the 'Summer of Love.' College students across the nation commemorated the event by spending eight hours a day in fluorescently lit cubicles, drinking cheap beer in a high school friend's pool and closely tracking the implosion of Britney Spears' career.
It's clear that this generation has little in common with the hippies of 1967, despite sharing similar national and global concerns. What's changed? How did parents who grew up in the '60s with sit-ins, the civil rights movement and other such events featured in "Forrest Gump," raise a generation of kids who don't really seem to care? Maxine Swann's novel, "Flower Children," begins to shed light on the mystery.
Swann's novel is a work of fiction that verges on autobiography, as the narrative voice shifts from omniscient to first person without a dramatic change in perspective or voice. Swann's third-person narrator uses short, simple sentences reminiscent of a child's speech, so the juxtaposition of voices is not a jarring one.
Maeve, the book's sometimes-narrator, chronicles her adolescence as she grows up with three siblings under the guidance of hippie parents. Maeve and her siblings dance naked in the rain outside their home that has dirt floors and few walls. Sex, drugs and flatulence are discussed freely and unabashedly. There is no television in Maeve's home, her parents bring lovers around openly, and none of it strikes any of the children as even slightly bizarre - until they go to school.
When the children discover TV, hairbrushes and the technology of footwear, they begin to feel alienated in their own world, a world that metamorphizes even further with the divorce of Maeve's parents.
A large portion of the short novel takes place in Maeve's father's car. Sam, a Harvard graduate who repairs chimneys between conspiracy theorizing, speaks to his children as he would an adult. With a subtle hand, Swann writes some of the book's most humorous and revealing dialogue during these exchanges between father and children; Sam instills in his children an appreciation of the unexpected and the wild, emphasizing the importance of seeing the beauty in the unkempt.
In contrast, Sam satirizes the family's neighbor who painstakingly manages a pristine garden, saying, "You know what's going to happen to Ed Trout? ... He's going to die and go up to heaven, and at the gates where God is, God's going to ask him, 'What have you done?' And he's going to say, 'God, I've kept this perfect garden. It was perfect every day.' And God's going to shake his head, 'Sorry Ed, that's not enough.' 'But I watered it every day.' 'Sorry Ed.'"
The normalcy that Ed Trout represents is something the children look at with wonderment, disdain and envy all at once. As time passes, free-loving, environmentally minded people surround the children less and less and they slowly become consumed with the mainstream and the maintenance required to successfully swim along with it. The children and their classmates now live in a post-hippie world of Barry Manilow and lip gloss. By the 1970s, Maeve's friends' parents have long given up their bohemian ideals in favor of bourgeois life, which has an isolating, shaming effect on the children.
Maeve matures as the book unfolds, becoming more reflective and appreciative of her unique way of life. Though at times she seems to envy the children who have conventional parents, her language is often defiant and disapproving when she writes about the conservative people she encounters. With her simple language and use of frank dialogue, Swann manages to capture with authenticity the voice of a child who battles to understand her place in the changing world around her.
This passage, for instance, is typical of Swann's style: "Around the house there are briar patches with berries and thorns. There are gnarled apple trees with puckered gray skins. The windows are all open - the wasps are flying in. The clothes on the line are jumping like children with no heads but hysterical limbs."
The story does not unfold in a linear fashion but presents itself as a series of vignettes from Maeve's life. The characters are all entertaining in their eccentricities, but it is Swann's deft diction and beautifully simplistic sensibility that keep the reader engaged.
In the book's last sentence, Maeve reconciles the schism between the two phases of her life; it becomes clear that Maeve appreciates her childhood despite her distance from it: "... and now, hands in my pockets, whistling a little tune, I pick myself up and stroll away."
