Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, 238 pages

Slouching Towards Bethlehem collects a series of Joan Didion's short essays from the 1960s, covering subjects from Alcatraz to Howard Hughes to the CPUSA, but mostly herself and triple-faced California - LA, San Francisco, and Sacramento.

The title essay relates the author's experiences exploring Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, which exemplifies her overarching (but not overpowering) theme of the emptiness at the heart of '60s America, an emptiness so profound that even those who feel it - like those San Francisco hippies - lack the words to describe it or the means to escape it.  Yet the most remarkable piece may be "On Morality", in which she diagnoses American post-War social fragmentation, not as the result of a lack of morality, but the surfeit of it - innumerable competing individual moralities each demanding validation.

God's Forever Family

God's Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America by Larry Eskridge, 284 pages

It was inevitable, in hindsight, that the rising tide of Evangelical Christianity, which surged in the '50s and '60s, should encounter the counterculture explosion of the late '60s.  It was equally inevitable that some of the spiritual seekers of the counterculture would find their search leading to Christianity, particularly in some of its more enthusiastic, experiential forms.  At the time, however, to the long-hairs on the streets of Haight-Ashbury and the Sunday-best faithful listening to Billy Graham on the radio equally, it seemed unthinkable.  How it happened, how drug culture casualties seeking a fresh start and square missionaries seeking to connect with disaffected youth came together to become the "Jesus Freaks" or "Jesus People", is the subject of God's Forever Family.

The Jesus People are generally understood as either a footnote of evangelical history or a footnote of countercultural history, one of the many ephemeral phenomena of the '60s and '70s.  In addition to chronicling the movement's brief peak in the early '70s and its rapid disappearance from American cultural consciousness in the late '70s, Eskridge emphasizes its lasting aftereffects, on individuals as much as on the wider society, especially in the creation of a vibrant evangelical subculture and the rise of the seeker-oriented megachurch.

Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, 369 pages

From America's greatest living novelist comes the story of Doc, a private investigator - of sorts - in the Southern California of 1969, who becomes involved in a tangled set of schemes and plots drawing together missing real estate developers, possibly undead surf musicians, frozen-banana-loving crooked cops, seductive masseuses, and mysterious ships from the Bermuda Triangle (or close enough), all adrift in an ocean of drugs the size of the Pacific.

Indeed, there are so many drugs that the excess quickly tips over into parody.  There's also quite a bit of carefree sex, and some rock and roll, if you can dig it.  If nothing else, Inherent Vice is certainly a vibrant trip through a weird, wild, colorful world, and even if it is more Vineland than Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon remains the poet laureate of the postmodern age of narcissism and paranoia.

Wild Abandon, Joe Dunthorne

Wild Abandon, Joe Dunthorne,  319 pages

       I just checked this book out yesterday and promptly finished it this morning, not because it was badly written, but because I would have felt like there was something missing in my life if I didn't.  I kid you not, it was a great read, and amusing as all get out.  I was searching our online catalogue for fiction under the heading "end of the world" and this is one of the titles that came up in the search. 
        The narrative is centered around a family who lives on a commune in present day Wales, who are changing and coming apart at the seams. The book ended up being less about the end of the world and more about quirky characters that would go well in a film not unlike The Royal Tannenbaums.  The writing reminded me a lot of a British Tom Robbins, something akin to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues or Still Life With Woodpecker.  I cared less about the plot and more about the behavior of the protagonists, and their interactions with each other.  Worth the time, to be sure.