Hate in the Time of Free Love

By Lev Grossman

There probably weren't really that many murderous hippies running around in the 1960s, but you wouldn't know it from the novels of the past decade. Ever since Merry Levov blew up a post office in Philip Roth's American Pastoral, it has been like one long, literary Altamont: Russell Banks, T.C. Boyle, Susan Choi, Christopher Sorrentino and Dana Spiotta have all written books about nut-job flower children. And here come two more: Peter Carey's His Illegal Self (Knopf; 272 pages) and Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions (Dutton; 288 pages). Didn't anybody just leave it at taking illegal drugs and having promiscuous sex?

His Illegal Self is about a boy named Che whose mom accidentally blows herself up making bombs for a Weathermen-style group. (The specter of Weatherwoman Kathy Boudin haunts all these books.) A fellow traveler named Dial (short for dialectic, ugh) scoops Che up and flees with him to Australia, where she and Che hide out with a band of smelly rural hippies. There is nobody who is not a drag in this book: the cops; the angry, self-righteous American radicals who fight the cops; even the listless Australian hippies, though they are (I think) supposed to be the sympathetic ones. You're left feeling that the only choices are being violently idealistic, selling out or subsistence farming on a flyblown commune, and you can't tell which is worst.

Kunzru's My Revolutions stages the same dilemma more deftly in the story of ex-radical Chris Carver, who's living in deep cover in placid suburban England 30 years after his crew went on a bombing spree. Kunzru's theme is summed up in the circularity of the title: when Chris' cover gets blown, he has to confront the way idealism becomes what it opposes ("War can only be abolished through war") and the way lies--like Carver's capitalist-pig identity--can turn into the truth.

Meanwhile, Choi's new book, A Person of Interest (Viking; 356 pages), is set after the 1960s, but it's also got bombs. A shy, touchy Asian math professor is falsely suspected of mailing explosives to computer experts, tidily recalling both scientist Wen Ho Lee and the Unabomber.

It's not that these books don't ring true. They're just weirdly uninterested in how little of '60s protest culture involved violence and how much it actually did accomplish. You get the feeling that attacking idealists of the past--indeed, associating them with terrorism--is a backhanded way of excusing the miserable, apathetic state of political protest in the present. At least the hippies cared about something--even if it wasn't personal hygiene.