THE TIME THAT WAS THE SIXTIES

...and he brings to his account of the breakdown of the civil-rights movement an unusual degree of sympathetic understanding...

...Though he feels compelled to include a chapter on rock music, he is primarily concerned with developments in American poetry and fiction and only secondarily explores literary criticism, social theory, and journalism...

...That, however, is very doubtful...

...Unlike the roman a clef which portrays real people under fictional names, Abigail McCarthy gives us an interesting variation: "Real people walk through the story under their own names, but, with one exception, they carry on fictional conversations with fictional characters in a way that I think is faithful to the manner of their own casual conversations...

...But while he insists that such a Left is essential not only for political sanity but for social progress, he gives no indication that a credible American Left is even possible...

...BOOKS i I I I TIlE TIME THAT WAS THE SIXTIES WllLLI&M II...

...The general narrowing of political vision in those years was paralleled by a specific narrowing of the novelist's focus, so that reality was seen "less in terms of money, class, and social ambition than as an infinitely complex web of personal relationships and subtle shades of consciousness...

...Within these limits his book is a sustained and illuminating analysis of American writers and their relationship to the wider culture...

...The plot line is simple: the rise and fall of a presidential candidate, Senator Sam Nordald, and the influence of the media upon his career...

...then come three years of turbulence...

...Hodgson argues again and again that the deeply flawed consensus arose in the first place because there was no American Left to criticize it...

...At the same time the "comic-apocalyptic" themes of these authors foreshadowed another side of the sixties, and in one of the most penetrating passages in the book, Dickstein contrasts them with the themes of the novels of the fifties: "For the fifties writers history is remote and irrelevant compared to 'private people and their minute concerns...

...It's the story of an attempt made by Marilyn (Geraldine Chaplin) to lure Russell (Christopher Walken), a gigolo, away from the wealthy Roseland habitu6 who supports him...

...then the Nixon era begins...

...The concerns of the book are complex, however, and the question of women's identity is central...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, Jig...

...But she tries to force the issue on a night when they are all gathered at Roseland for a welcome-back party for Pauline, who is recently out of the hospital...

...Determined to refute McLuhan's assumption that "books have been displaced," Dickstein concentrates almost exclusively on the written word...

...Hodgson takes as his theme nothing less than the rise and fall of the governing consensus in the two decades after World War II...

...McCarthy uses the technique of multiple point of view and, thus, we are privy to the thoughts of five major characters at different times throughout the novel...

...But by arguing that the 1968 election saw a rejection of "liberalism," he also implies that it marked the collapse of the governing consensus and its illusions...

...Born of warinduced prosperity and the frustrations of world power, shaped in the confrontation between the Establishment Center and the McCarthyite Right, that consensus had been formulated by about 1955...

...But from the start the consensus incorporated too many illusions about the problem-solving potentials of economic expansion at home and military inte~ention abroad...

...In the early 1960s, in contrast, "there was a scent of change in the air, a sense of things opening up" in both politics and literature, and in the "experimental forms" of Joseph HeUer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon he finds a "creative exuberance," a "belief that old molds can be broken and recast," which would become leitmotifs for the entire culture of the decade...

...Much of this has been said before, though seldom at such a consistent level of excellence...

...Laura Talbert, a widow in her sixties, has been both participant and spectator in Washington's social circles Commonweal: 759...

...Now all of this analysis is debatable, but the point is that by his own terms he seems to foreclose the possibility of the very movement he believes essential for a more rational and a more humane political system...

...Gates o f Eden: Amer'aean Culture i n t h e S i x t i e s MORRIS DICKSTEIN Basic Books, $11.95 Amertea i n Our Time GODFREY HODGSON Doubleday, $12.95 In the present context of disillusionment and drift, it is not surprising to see a spate of books on the 1960s, written less for purposes of fabricating nostalgia than for finding out where we are now and how we got here...

...Read carefully, his book gives a very different impression: "it is in fact much worse...

...Two of the most rewarding of these new syntheses are Morris Dickstein's Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties and Godfrey Hodgson's America in Our Time...

...for the sixties writers history is absurd but it can kill you...

...Russell decides to stay with Pauline, and it is impossible to say whether it is his own sloth and dependence that makes him do so, or a genuine decency that renders him incapable of deserting Pauline in need...

...Marilyn wants to take Russell away from all that...

...His talents, however, are not limited 25 November 1977:7S8 to the dissection of statistical data: his analysis of the hucksters of the counterculture is exceptionally sharp...

...He points out that neither Nader nor the ecology movement nor women's liberation have transcended their middle-class base, yet his conclusions about the American working class serving as a basis for the Left are pessimistic...

...in fact he goes out of his way to make Kennedy's administration indistinguishable from Eisenhower's...

...Circles is an absorbing first novel, and it is cleverly written...

...Dickstein's "sense of things opening up" in the early sixties is largely missing from Hodgson's book...

...The one possible exception-and a very limited one at that--is the middle episode of Roseland...

...For many years American correspondent for the London Times and the Observer, he has few peers in mastering detail...

...She tells us that the event did not take the course suggested in her novel, "but very well could have...

...None of the self-contradiction in man on which real art depends is evident in the films I'm dealing with here...

...Marilyn can see only that Russell is prostituting himself with the beautiful but ailing and cloying heiress, Pauline (Joan Copeland), who supports him...

...yet in another sense-in the sense in which Dickstein discusses the culture of the decade--"the sixties" do not appear at all Hodgson's "consensus" continues uninterrupted until about 1965...

...And (at least since the Coolidge years) has any group in power been more complacent about the American economic system than the ideologues who surrounded Gerald Ford...

...As a result, the optimism Hodgson expresses in the opening and closing chapters--in which he seems to say, "It is not as bad as you think, Americans"nappears misplaced...

...What makes Hodgson's book frequently provocative (and occasionally puzzling) are the perspectives through which he sees all these developments...

...Half of his book, for example, covers the years 1963 through 1969...

...But then .this is also the episode that comes closest to being an interaction among characters, a drama, rather than just a character study...

...The story was suggested t o Mrs...

...Hodgson emphasizes its racial fragmentation, its self-conscious "Americanism," and its pursuit of an "equality of Opportunity" that he deems unreal--all of which have produced working-class support for candidates of the Right...

...Since the novel is subtitled "a Washington story," the focus is on the identity of married and single women involved, however peripherally, in the game of politics...

...Whichever is the case, this one moment in Roseland manages to give us a much more privileged sense of human nature than is found in any of the other films discussed here, wonderful ,as the smiling public selves we see in them are...

...But the reader should be forewarned that his focus is somewhat narrower than his subtitle might imply...

...McCarthy by an incident in the presidential year of 1972, and she deftly places it in a "hypothetical 1976," with the actual candidates of that year...

...The narrative begins and ends with Laura Talbert and her sections form a frame, or a circle, about the plot line concerning Senator Nordahl and his wife...

...Confident to the point of complacency about the perfectibility of American society, anxious to the point of paranoia about the threat of communism," the consensus reached its culmination in the presidential campaigns of 1960...

...C i r c l e s ABIGAIL McCARTHY Doubleday, $7.95 BARBARA MUTKOSK...

...Did any administration ever show more "paranoia about the threat of communism" than Richard Nixon's, a paranoia no less intense because it focused On students in California and on workers in Chile more than on bureaucrats in the Kremlin...

...HI[X~DN, ,]flit...

...The satisfying irony of this episode is that Russell turns out in the end to represent a more complex view of human experience, and therefore perhaps a more moral one, than the good-hearted Marilyn...

...on the other, a smaller group of authors are attempting the riskier task of "putting it all together...

...If Dickstein singles out certain aspects of American culture for close analysis, Godfrey Hodgson is determined to encompass the entire sweep of society...

...Hodgson dispatches with ease such convoluted questions as trends in the distribution of income, the impact of the war on inflation, or the shape of public opinion in 1968...

...On the one hand, the university presses are beginning to pour out monographs on the Indochina war, black protest, and political trends...

...In the case of fiction, for example, Dickstein argues that the realist tradition reached a dead end in the 1950s...

...It was Lyndon Johnson's tragedy not only to act on the flawed assumptions of the consensus but to do so at the very point at which these forces manifested themselves in ghetto riots, student protests, and "white backlash...

...Throughout his book Hodgson insists on describing the consensus established in the mid-fifties as a "liberal" consensus, reminding the reader only at the very end of his account that it included conservatives as well as liberals, businessmen as well as intellectuals...

...Dickstein addresses himself directly to cultural developments within the decade...

...And it consistently overlooked those social forces which would ultimately disrupt it: the migration of blacks out of the South, the explosion of the collegestudent population, the insecurities of a very real working class...