The Whole Gestalt Catalogue

...Still, there are compensations in their allegiance to the "Human Potential Movement": It proves how far they have come...

...For example, buttons reading "Marcel Proust Was a Yenta" are dreary...

...with outsized pages and a bright cardboard cover it more closely resembles a glossy magazine...

...If the only "Roots" these people have been able to put down are the shoes of that name, and the only families they have been able to establish are the "extended" ones created by multiple divorce, they cannot be charged with lack of effort: They have seized every opportunity to "get centered," from neo-Reichian body work and Feldenkrais functional integration to est and transactional analysis...

...It's been good experiencewise...

...There is Martha, who marries her fifth husband in a hip wedding on Mount Tarn...

...The impression of impermanence is furthered by a spiral binding, imitation rotogravure illustrations, 52 episodic installments, and enumeration of untold fashionable commodities, suggesting that the catalogues of The Whole Earth and I. Magnin have been shuffled together in a new format...

...True, the figurative use of spatial tags comes naturally to us: "She's out of her mind" is a common example...

...This is the inevitable English for bourgeois Bohemians...

...The former owner's name is not an easy pun about money...

...One of them marvels that back in Spokane "she had been programmed...

...Asiatic Fleet used to say they were keeping China safe "for Standard Oil, Robert Dollar and Jesus Christ...

...Running counter to these abstractions and temporizings are other idioms that, thanks to McFadden, one suddenly hears as part of a new pattern...

...The reader has no such involvement (or so one hopes) in the life of the mind as Marin defines it...

...Bay Area residents, of course, have an edge in catching all the local allusions...

...He is an escrow officer in a San Francisco bank, recovering from his 40th birthday with the uneasy conviction that things are not so promising as they once seemed...

...In an "agonizing reappraisal" of their marriage they experiment bravely with new lifestyle she in a rented "condo" with an Innerspace waterbed, she in a commune that has advertised for a "mature, mellow, female vegetarian...

...What's going down...

...But to get the idea, the reader need not have frequented the restaurants where patrons have "enchilada'd out" or "O.D.'d on tostadas compuestas...

...Marin County is not merely "this whole energy trip with all these happening people...

...Lest I give a wrong impression that Cyra McFadden is another Frederick Jackson Turner writing on the disappearance of the frontier, a linguistics theorist, or an authority on the contradictions of capitalism, I'd better repeat that the The Serial is a funny book, and add that it frequently descends to broad slapstick and bedroom farce...

...Nevertheless, this characterization is somewhat misleading as well, for despite the comic soap-opera trappings, the reader is not left in a lighthearted mood...

...Yet she misses the stimulating parties they gave together?the whole vital, eclectic gestalt"And realizes that the guests' conversationAbout environmental impact reports, saunas vs...

...The profligacy of the middle class has been extensively explored in the popular literature of Fairfield and Westchester counties, and in California fiction we have already encountered a great many variations on the theme of the American Dream betrayed...

...In any case, the recital of nationally known goods and services is long enough to let most outsiders get their bearings, although in this generous offering there is a catch: If you score high in identifying the hundreds of modish references, you stand indicted on charges of rampant consumerism...

...He hung a right into his driveway...

...But they are not quite "OK...

...Naomi, a "heavy-duty intellectual" with two MAs (sociology, batik) from Mills College, is "fantastic at conceptualizing...

...These indicate an attempt to solidify the insubstantial, to locate everything: "She ought to put her own needs right up front and then get behind them...

...If you score low, and feel the slightest twinge of regret at being left out, you are implicated no less...

...Kate liked the space he was in...

...It helps, though, when the reader learns to distinguish the writer's wit from the county's...

...Depression remains a "downer" and failure feels like "a bummer...

...it is for Cyra McFadden a heavy scene indeed...

...Leonard, surprisingly insensitive for a man "who had spent three weeks at Esalin and knew Werner Erhard personally," is a psychologist specializing in "the dysfunctional socialization of rich children...

...just taking it for granted that 'success' meant a house in the suburbs, two cars and an FHA mortgage...

...Also predictably, friendship, love and sex are rendered impersonal through such usages as "peer groups," "syndrome" and "high incompatibility quotient...

...The positioning expressions are often employed in direct proportion to the complexity of what is to be communicated and the speaker's vagueness and confusion about it...

...Japanese hot tubs, and quadraphonic stereo meant that "there were all these terrifically intelligent vital people in Marin who had practically Renaissance minds...

...At the end, Harvey is addicted to Valium, and Kate wants to keep him that way so he won't "come on hostile...

...She got off on weddings...

...Nor need one have shopped at I. Magnin's in order to appreciate the information that Kate's "herdsman's caftan" was purchased there...

...Now, in Marinthat "sunny blend of affluence, redwoods [and] bohemianism"McFadden has found follies that are remarkable, to begin with, for their sheer concentration...

...householders driving miles to deliver their empty bottles to recycling depots, their bumper stickers proclaiming that they'd "Rather Be Sailing," are funny...

...And Marlene, Harvey's teen-age mistress?basically a beautiful human being, and you couldn't beat her for sensory gratification...

...What is new about her "living space," however, is the unworldliness, the inane fecklessness, that its settlers (originally "from Indiana or some Godforsaken place") combine with their pursuit of so many worldly goods...

...On the anniversary of Martha's (failed) marriage, the Holroyds renew their own vows at "A Celebration of Open Commitment" in "the old Robert Dollar mansion," rented for the occasion...

...Kate is happy when she and Harvey "split for a while...

...Yet it is a novelA funny, clever and original satire on the waste of money, energy and lives...

...In the Holroyds' friends and acquaintances, McFadden presents a wide range of adults and children who respond to this privileged environment in different ways...

...While the speech of these pundits-jargon drawn from rock, sports, sociology, the drug culture, aerospace, psychotherapy, data processing, and many other "here/now" fieldsmay soon date The Serial, McFadden's brilliant use of the lingo is a lasting reminder of the relation of language to life...

...The younger generation on display promises to provide many patients, including Joan, the Holroyds' adolescent daughter, who runs away to join the Moonies, and an assortment of infant delinquents who are subjected to survival training and soft-encounter groups at progressive camps when they are not attending their alternative nursery schools...

...even though all experience was good if you took the cosmic overview...

...It's like sad" is familiar to anyone who has listened to adolescents in the past decade: "Like, it doesn't reverse man," says Joan's friend of his Harley chopper...

...The sly suggestion that these pioneering lifestylists are the rightful heirs of the steamship magnate and the other California robber barons confirms a suspicion we've had all along: The author has a keen understanding of economic and social history...

...Old sailors in the U.S...

...Predictably, the word "like" is uttered often to soften or call into question the simplest statements...

...where his head is at...

...This terminology reaches a hilarious apotheosis when we are told, "They had finalized the parameters of their own interface...

...The litany of their pretensions becomes on occasion shrill and tedious...

...But in The Serial, when a worried friend says, "She isn't even tracking," it provides a false assurance, a pathetic attempt to assert that there is a placeor "space"for everyone and everything, if only it could be found...

...She is a member of a consciousness-raising group, a gourmet cook out of "Julia 2" who does macrame work as "a substitute for her real gifts of expression...

...the once notorious Dollar made his millions with a worldwide shipping line...

...True, she had a house in the suburbs, et cetera, et cetera, but she would have been the first to insist that none of this stuff really meant anything...

...because her philosophy, like Sartre's, was that everybody was responsible for his own number...

...Such self-deceptions are typical of The Serial's average couple and main characters, Kate and Harvey Holroyd...