BOOKS
COMING-Of-AGE
GROWING UP , ...BSURD. By Paul Goodmlln. Rllndom House.
$4.50.
In some ways Mr. Goodman's book
is
like the other
works of social analysis and cultural self-examination that have
been pouring out of American publishing houses in recent years.
Predictably, he points out the stultifying effects of conformity, the
mass society, and the Organized System. Like the others, his book
is something of a jeremiad-"gloomy" he calls it, although gloom
is far from my final impression of it. But unlike the other analysts
of the Situation, Mr. Goodman looks at things from the point of
view of the young, and this is what gives '
Growing
Up
Absurd
its
genuine originality and importance.
It
is also what gives the book
not only its special poignance and depth but its special realism and
relevance.
The great thing about
Growing
Up
Absurd
is that, wayward,
aphoristic, alternately gauche, moving, and witty as it is, it gives
one the sense of being firmly grounded in the contemporary world,
and probably in the future. The book has a utopian tone, to be
sure, yet one is led continually to reflect that the accurate, un–
adorned, unembarrassed, unideologized observation of simple con–
temporaneous fact has become so rare and difficult as to be in
itself something of a utopian activity. This is because we live,
Mr. Goodman would say, in a civilization which seems determined
to remove as many of its citizens as possible as far as possible
from the root conditions of life, and to keep our youth from
growing up any way but "absurd," or worse.
Many of Goodman's fellow cultural analysts are equivocal
in their answers (if they give any) to two basic questions. Are
our troubles the inevitable result of history and of the material
culture we live in? Do the traditional liberal-radical programs
