Flower power

     The Love Children was Marilyn French's last novel, written when she was almost eighty years old, but its narrator is a much younger woman - Jess Leighton ages from her teens to her early fifties in the course of the story - and that more youthful voice is pitch-perfect throughout. The book's style is fairly languid narration, very easy to read, very natural and quite low-key, never over-written, and its subject matter is 'the love children', the generation of pacifist, free-living, drug-hazed teenagers growing up in the late 1960s and early 70s.

    I confess to being reminded of a Dennis the Menace cartoon in which a group of placard-bearing marchers are shouting, "we want something to protest about", because there's a broad self-righteous, hypocritical streak in Jess and her friends (she herself admits as much) and their posturing and immaturity can be trying.

     Jess drops out of college and joins a commune - so far, so stereotypical - and there's more in that vein. Her friends all lose their way, too, and thus one of the book's themes is how to find happiness, how to be "a lucky person", because it seems that's an uncommon state in the Cambridge, Massachusetts of the period. In the end, Jess finds more or less what she's been looking for, and it turns out to be in a much more conventional form than her early, experimental life might have suggested.

    Did I enjoy the book? Despite silently urging one and all to get a grip, yes, I did. What lifts it away from the tiresomeness of the characters' pre-occupations is the writing itself and two other elements: a liberal seasoning of literary references (Jess aspires to be a poet) and lots of foodie content - highly relevant to the plot, as you'll see if you read it. It's a small-scale, personal book, not a polemic, and while it's hung on issues, that's done in a rather 'off-the-shoulder' way.

Comments

[Danielle]

I've never read anything by Marilyn French, but I've always felt I should since she is from that generation of feminists in the 60s and 70s that helped change so much. I know what you mean by semi-annoying characters yet the prose transcends them. I've added this one to my wishlist!