454
PARTISAN REVIEW
Sun,
chronicling the marital traumas of Harvey and Kate Holroyd as
they ferociously pursue the good life in suburban San Francisco. Part
of that pursuit is their typically Californian ambition to move,
literally, up the hill-which, much to their chagrin, they have failed
to
do: "Harvey made a lot more money now than he had then, but they
spent it rapidly on things they hadn't known existed ten years ago:
Rossignol Stratos and season lift tickets at Squaw; twin Motobecane
ten-speeds; Kate's Cuisinart, which did
everything
but put the pate in
the oven; Klip speakers and the top-of-the-line Pioneer receiver. ... "
And so on, as the eternal brand-name draws them upwards. But life in
Marin is not just materialism run wild; there is also the search for inner
satisfaction, memorably summed up in the career of Rita, a high school
friend of Kate's from Spokane:
Deeply involved in the human-polential movement, she had like
mutated
over the years lhrough Gurdjieff, Silva Mind Control,
aClualism, analYlical tracking, parapsychology, Human Life Slyl–
ing, postural integralion, the Fischer-Hoffman Process, hatha and
raja yoga, integral massage, orgonomy, palmistry, Neo-Reichian
bodywork and Feldenkrais functional integralion. Currently she was
commuling lO Berkeley lwice a week for "polarilY balancing manip–
ulation," which, she reported lhrough her annual mimeographed
Christmas leller, produces "good lhinking."
McFadden 's compendium of the follies of Marin escape artists is
irresistibly funny and sharp eyed; still, her satire has a traditionalist
bias that itself deserves a critica l look. Her book ridicules every
conceivable West Coast cliche of the past decade, from "I hear you" to
"Life is part of existence." This language, now made notorious as
"Psycho-babble," appears in
The Serial
in an undiluted form that
practically no one in California actua lly speaks. Most people, self–
consciously ironic, playoff its cliches against more standard diction; in
any case, it has long been California's role to endlessly throw up and
combine new fashions in popular cu lture, including linguistic ones.
McFadden also takes a conservative line in her sympathy for
Harvey's campaign against Marin trendiness, especially the feminist
version thereof. His preference for Cutty Sark and Monday night
football over hash and sensitivity groups makes him an individualist of
a sort, though one who knows he must pay lip service to the received
pieties of his milieu:
Harvey believed in equa l pay for equal work; he did his share of lhe
chores for his and Kale's dinner parties by choosing the wine and
