The Group

By LANCE MORROW

LOOSE CHANGE by Sara Davidson 367 pages. Doubleday. $9.50.

Jeff, a Berkeley Bakunin, worked at shutting down the Establishment and the war; Susie kept nagging him to take a shower and use deodorant. They became, writes Sara Davidson, "a showpiece couple. They demonstrated and went to jail together." They did everything together except levitate the Pentagon. Tasha, with her Pre-Raphaelite beauty, was the arty one. She fell in love with a well-known sculptor and worried about having small breasts.

Sara (Author Davidson has made herself one of the central characters in her book) was a second-generation Californian, a freelance journalist who "wanted to be the Girl of the Sixties brand-new, streamlined, groovy daring upfront, telling it like it is. I also wanted to stop wearing a bra, but Jane and I worried that it would cause our breasts to droop."

Loose Change started out as a promising idea: a kind of updating of The Group, a Mary McCarthy treatment of three women who attended Berkeley in the early '60s, then went caroming through the rest of the manic decade trying to understand both themselves and the cultural eruptions all around them --an impossibility. "In that time that decade which belonged to the young," writes Davidson, "we had thought life was free and would never run out. We were certain we belonged to a generation that was special. We did not need or care about history because we had sprung from nowhere." Such were the pretensions of what the Census Bureau now refers to as merely a "demographic bulge."

Davidson spent many months interviewing her old classmates Susie and Tasha. She is often an acute observer and ironist. When the radicals Susie and Jeff decided to get married, the bride's mother, Mrs. Hersh negotiated the affair upward until it became a reception for 200 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. On her wedding night, Susie suffered an ethical crisis over whether to wear a lacy nightgown her mother had packed.

But the book has at least two defects --one technical, one spiritual. To set historical contexts, Davidson simply unreels fast montages: Kennedy shot Timothy Leary ... Negroes at lunch counters . . Buddhists on fire ... Madame Nhu . . . and so on, as if the names of the events were pills -- as if merely popping them were enough to evoke the entire drama. It is not enough.

The second problem is more serious. Davidson meets with the guru Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary's partner in chemical consciousness. In a spasm of sincerity, Sara understands: "From my new perspective.I saw that most pieces of journalism, certainly my most successful pieces, were based on an attitude of superiority and ridicule. If I wanted to honor the divinity in people, I could no longer treat them this way -- coaxing them into spilling information I could use against them to make a good story."

Odd Negligence. That worthy sentiment seems to turn Davidson's prose to pulp. When her irony departs, she sounds as preposterous as Cosmo fantasy: "He was a full professor, and yet there was about him a spirit of hijinks." The women's sex lives -- their entire lives, in fact -- seem like nothing so much as an interminable game of pinball-- careening from one man to another with an awful earnestness, a flashing of lights and banging of flippers. Susie, who solves her frigidity with a vibrator, decides eventually that having slept with more than 100 men, "it was probably her historical destiny to live alone."

Though sometimes moving, the women's lives as told by Davidson have an odd negligence about them and the unique stupidity that comes with a certain kind of self-absorption. At the end, with a cross-eyed earnestness, Susie proclaims: "I don't want any more trips. I want substance and depth." Davidson's book hasn't very much of either -- only the shallows of countercultural soap opera.

Lance Morrow

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