The 1960s

The 1960s appear not as a direct account of the decade but as a remembered threshold: a time when the East Coast middle class feared that its world was coming apart, and whose upheavals later defined what the narrator believed his own generation had missed. The decade’s force lies both in its catalogue of rebellion and in the cautious social inheritance that followed it.

Upheaval and Its Aftermath

The narrator describes the East Coast middle class as having been badly frightened in the 1960s, when its whole world seemed to fall apart. In his account, the generation’s children were then educated to prevent that upheaval from happening again. The decade is compressed into a vivid inventory—music, marches, the Summer of Love, experimentation with drugs, Woodstock, and contraceptives—which gives its unrest a public and personal reach without specifying particular events or causes.

That memory becomes the first part of a generational contrast. The 1970s, by comparison, brought the end of the Vietnam nightmare alongside disco, flared pants, and racial emancipation. Against both decades, the narrator saw the 1980s as lacking anything epic: his generation, he felt, had missed the train. The 1960s thus function as the lost measure of historical possibility in his account, not simply as a period that preceded his college years.

A Decade Filtered Through the Narrator

The narrator’s picture of the 1960s is bound to his interpretation of the decades that followed. He portrays Ronald Reagan as summoning the spirits of the 1950s, while money dismantles the altars of other gods and prepares for a victory dance. The contrast makes the remembered upheaval of the 1960s seem to have yielded, in his telling, to a revival of older national values and the ascendancy of free enterprise. This is the narrator’s skeptical framing, not a detached survey of the period.

The decade also belongs to the story of how the narrator made a writer’s identity for himself. He acknowledges that his gloomy, skeptical worldview may have existed chiefly in his own mind, and says it developed after he decided to become a writer toward the end of high school, with Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo as powerful influences. He had convinced himself that a real writer must be sad and lonely, yet receive large royalty checks and holiday in expensive European resorts. His analogy to Job imagines suffering as the condition that makes literary achievement possible. Set beside his sense that his generation missed the 1960s, this self-fashioned ideal links historical disappointment to a literary pose: both make hardship and loss appear necessary to significance.