Pagan Time: An American Childhood
It's always a pleasure to read a memoir about the 1960s that doesn't rationalize or recriminate but instead concentrates on conveying the texture of those wild times. Micah Perks's matter-of-fact re-creation of her counterculture childhood makes it clear that living without rules had severe consequences, but she also captures the anarchic pleasures of that life. Perks was 6 weeks old in 1963 when her parents borrowed $20,000 to buy 550 acres of land in the Adirondacks and establish the Valley Commune School. They took in troubled teens referred by the courts and children disabled by mental illness, aiming to help them grow up "free from the suffocating values of mainstream society." "We're changing the established order," her charismatic, feckless father asserted, handing out guns to juvenile delinquents and organizing a "war" between Romans and Celts in which the retreating Romans set fire to a pagan shrine. Micah's best friend, she learned 20 years later, was sexually abused by an older boy and his girlfriend; her father slept with students and virtually any other woman he ran across; in retaliation her mother began an affair with the man who would eventually become her lifelong partner. Readers may well be horrified by the grownups' abdication of responsibility, but Perks herself is unfazed by the vagaries of human nature and seems to bear no grudge, though her adult attitude toward her parents is wary. "That was the best part of my life," she concludes, adding in a properly parenthetical aside: "(best is not quite accurate, but I don't know what other word to use)." Judging by her scrupulous, evenhanded narrative, we can guess that for all the terror and uncertainty she endured, she values her childhood for the intensity and honesty she experienced watching a bunch of principled misfits live their convictions.--Wendy Smith