Our Books, Ourselves

When Harper-Collins recently rolled out its new line of large-print books aimed at the aging boomer market, I was riled. "I don't need no stinkin' large print," I grumbled. Then I picked up the first book in the new format, Michael Crichton's "Next," and I had to admit that—well, it was a little easier on the eyes. So this is what we've come to, I thought as I sat down to write this essay—and immediately jumped the typeface on my computer to 16-point. These days, boomer literature isn't any particular kind of writing. It's just books with big print.

Though really, boomers should probably be flattered that someone still considers us a target audience at all. But the underlying suggestion is valid enough: was there ever a time when the boomer generation could be defined by a common bookshelf? Certainly most people can, without much trouble, think of titles and authors and characters that serve as a kind of shorthand for readers who came of age in the '60s and '70s. Holden Caulfield needs no introduction. "Fear and loathing" is a catchphrase that won't die. Green eggs and ham are on everyone's menu. I haven't seen a copy in 30 years, but I can still remember the faux-hippie lettering on the cover of "The Greening of America," and the way everyone's copy of "The Medium Is the Massage" fell apart because the spines always cracked. I can see the Ballantine Books logo on the spine of "Lord of the Rings." "Soul on Ice," "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "Slaughterhouse-Five" were oversize paperbacks, so they got separate shelf space from the smaller books, while The Whole Earth Catalog and "Our Bodies, Ourselves" were always on their sides, because they were too tall for any shelf. If you went to someone's apartment, you surreptitiously scanned the bookshelves (wood planks, cinder blocks) to see what kind of person this was. When did this first start? Prekindergarten, most likely: She's got "The Cat in the Hat." OK, she's cool.

Chances are that no single baby boomer read every single title on the boomer hit parade. Older boomers were more likely to own a copy of "On the Road." The youngest were more likely to go with "Bright Lights, Big City." Books are almost never the cultural markers that songs or movies are, if only because it takes a lot more effort to read a book. Who hasn't spent time squirming at a dinner party while everyone else was rambling ecstatically about Frodo or Dean Moriarty or some other character in a book that you know only by reputation? You didn't have to be a Dylan fan to know what Dylan was all about, because sooner or later you heard some, like it or not. But if you hadn't read Marshall McLuhan or Erica Jong, then you just had to sit there hoping someone would change the subject.

It's easy to write about the counterculture and think that you are writing about the '60s, when in fact you are writing about a very small part of the '60s. In the pop-culture version of rock-paper-scissors, movies and music will beat books every time in terms of the sheer audience numbers. But there is a ripple effect with books. The most direct ripple goes through Hollywood. The film version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" made Nurse Ratched a household name across the country. "Lord of the Rings" has been read by millions, but when the movie versions appeared, millions more saw it. And now and then a book gets into the culture all on its own and stubbornly refuses to leave. It's hard to imagine the '60s turning out the same way without "On the Road," "The Feminine Mystique" or "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." The noteworthy distinction with boomer books was the missionary zeal with which readers pressed their favorites on other readers. There were books that changed our lives, or we thought so at the time we first read them, and we wanted to spread the word. Maybe your book was "Understanding Media" or "The Catcher in the Rye." Mine was "To Kill a Mockingbird," a book I read until it threatened to fall apart in my hands. I still have my dog-eared copy, a paperback with a still from the movie as the jacket illustration. I still take it off the shelf and reread passages from time to time. But I don't love it unconditionally any longer. In fact, I find it a somewhat curious book to have taken to heart. I didn't grow up in a small Southern town. I had no siblings. The first time I read the novel, I didn't even know what rape was. The circumstances of my upbringing were, to my adolescent mind, much too bland. I grew up in an apartment in a middle-size Southern city, and as far as I could tell, nothing exciting ever happened there, to me or to anyone I knew. The childhood of Scout and Jem and Dill was not the childhood I had. It was the childhood I wanted.

Looking at the books that boomers read when they were young, you see a good number that embody such fantasies. Some of them are fantasies outright ("Lord of the Rings," "Stranger in a Strange Land"). Some set forth a utopian ideal ("The Greening of America"). But it wasn't all jolly elves living in cozy burrows. Quite a few books on that list embody surprisingly hard-nosed visions of life. "The Catcher in the Rye" verified what we already knew about the harshness of adolescence. "Catch-22" and "Slaughterhouse-Five" confirmed our suspicions that we were living in a world that made no sense. This was, after all, a generation that came of age in a world where assassinations were the norm and where soldiers could say with a straight face that they destroyed a village to save it.

The most noteworthy thing about that list, however, is that almost none of the books on it were written before 1950. Given the choice, we weren't the least bit interested in what tradition had to tell us. We didn't want to read what our parents read. We wanted to start with a fresh slate. Because … well, if for no other reason, because we could.