The Serial (1976) by Cyra McFadden

Cyra McFadden's hilarious satire of 70s mores and morals in affluent Marin County isn't, I suppose, among my all-time favourite books - it gets a bit monotonous after a while. But, with its short chapters, it's perfect for excerpting, and the observation throughout is razor-sharp : never have middle-class New Agers been so mercilessly lampooned. Here's a couple of chapters - "Boys and Girls Together" and "Fear and Loathing at Camp Middle Earth", respectively. Enjoy!

pp.101-104

The first meeting of the regrouped consciousness-raising group took place at the Holroyds' and was launched by Martha's suggestion that they all "just sort of turn inward for a moment and silently celebrate their womanhood."

Straight away, Harvey embarrassed Kate. Since he and Frank Gallagher and Martha's Bill and Angela's friend Paco were biologically unqualified to celebrate their womanhood, he suggested, maybe they could "just split for the 2 A.M. Club and have a quick beer while the girls turn inward."

Kate wasn't amused. "Harvey," she said coldly, "it wouldn't hurt you to try to relate for once. That's why we're here, you know? To really get down and relate. Anyway, the beer bit is out. Alcohol alters your perceptions. Like, it gets between you and reality."

"Yeah," Harvey said, sighing. "I know". But the way Kate and the rest were looking at him, he decided he'd better not make waves. "Okay. I'll just sort of sit here and celebrate my womanhood. I mean, I'll try to relate. You think it would help if I combed my hair?"

Frank Gallagher chuckled, but then he got this look from Ginger and copped out. "Wow, I'm sorry," Frank said. "I just can't help it. I'm a Leo. We're all very big on macho tripping. But I'm trying to, like, overcome it."

"Fink," said Martha's Bill viciously, under his breath. Harvey thought Bill looked just about as bummed out as he was. All week long he'd been trying to psych himself up for this whole scene, but by five o'clock this afternoon the prospect of discussing what Kate called his "honest emotions" with the Weird Sisters had him so freaked he'd primed himself on three martinis at Paoli's before he'd biked home.

Did Kate realize what happened on your reflexes when you rode a ten-speed on three martinis? Halfway down the grade into Sausalito, Harvey had had this mano a mano with a Langendorf bread truck he was sure had his number on it. Was raising his consciousness worth lowering his odds?

At least his worst nightmares hadn't come true. Marlene, the group's biggest success story, hadn't been able to make it tonight because, Kate told him, she was beginning Leonard Orr's Theta seminars and didn't want to miss anything. Marlene said Theta taught you how to overcome Specific Negatives like "hangups and physical death."

It sounded A-okay to Harvey, who wondered if Leonard Orr could teach him how to overcome specific negatives like Kate and her support troops. He wondered how Martha's Bill related to sitting on the sofa between Martha and his ex-wife Vivian. He wondered whether Vivian held her big floppy hat on with a hatpin.

He was wondering, too, if he could get away with faking an onslaught of swine flu, when he realized the moment of silence was over and Kate was going around the room offering everybody green tea and freaky little noshes she picked up at the Japanese Trade Center. "Sushi?" Kate kept saying brightly.

Frank Gallagher and all the women took some, but when Bill said he "punched out at raw fish," the sushi hit the fan. "Bill," said his ex-wife Vivian, "you just reminded me of something, sweetie. You just reminded me how closed you always were to experience, you know? Why don't you just open up? Why don't you make yourself vulnerable?". She put her hand with the long Liza Minnelli fingernails on his arm. "Listen, Bill, sweetie, you can eat raw fish and still be a man, don't you realize that?"

Bill wheeled around on the sofa. "That's a crock, Vivian," he snapped. "Anyway, what do you know about 'vulnerable'?". He turned to Angela Stein's Argentinian poodle-groomer, who plucked nervously at the creases in his leather suit. "Vivian here is about as vulnerable as the Corps of Engineers - you know what I mean?"

Paco smiled and nodded under his pompadour. "Pleese?" he said.

"Listen, Bill," Angela said promptly, "Paco's very sensitive about his English. In fact, he's very sensitive. So get off his case, okay? You don't have to come on like such a heavy."

"He didn't come on like a heavy," Harvey said. "He said he punched out at raw fish. So what's the problem? I can't get behind sushi either, you know? I'm boycotting Japanese food till they stop killing whales."

"Harvey," Ginger Gallagher said, "I think we'd better lay down some ground rules about now, okay? And rule number one is no power tripping. Nobody needs power tripping, Harvey. So you can just forget that head-honcho number you're trying to pull. You know very well Vivian wasn't talking about sushi ; sushi's just a metaphor. Isn't that right, Paco?"

"Pleese?" Paco said. Harvey noticed that Paco's black-bean eyes were fixed on Kate, who had frozen in front of him with her Cost Plus lacquer tray. He also flashed that Kate was staring back at Paco like a deer in front of somebody's headlights.

"Sure, I hear you Ginger," Harvey told her. "Wow, that's terrific, what you said. About how sushi's a metaphor. I always thought of it as, you know, raw fish?"

This time Martha took him on. "Harvey," she said, too sweetly, "don't you realize Vivian is trying to help Bill? That's what we're here for. To help each other."

Harvey was beginning to realize his back was to the wall. He looked at Frank Gallagher, but Frank had gone over to the other side and was practically licking Ginger's hand. He looked at Bill, but Bill was engaged in heated debate with his ex-wife about which of them was the flake. "Hey, Kate," Harvey finally called weakly, "I could use a little help over here. Hey, Kate, baby?"

Kate didn't hear him. She was still standing there clutching her lacquer tray like Madame Butterfly and staring at Angela Stein's Latin poodle-groomer, who Harvey thought looked like something out of a Tubes concert.

"Paco," he heard her saying slowly, through the growing uproar in his living room, "do you ever clip Afghans? Af-ghans?"

Paco looked up at her meltingly. His suit creaked as he reached for a piece of sushi, swallowed it whole without ever taking his eyes off Kate, and licked his fingers.

"Pleese..." Paco said.

pp. 156-159

While Gregor enjoyed killing chickens and Tamalpa had a crush on her counsellor, Rhododendron, Che hated everything about summer camp. First they routed him out of his tipi at dawn to do yoga out under the redwood trees, and then he was expected to spend the morning chopping firewood for the hot tub. Che missed Martha, TV and Fritos. He wasn't consoled by Sufi dancing and hated the evening soft-encounter groups, when somebody always called him a baby and pointed out that he picked his nose.

Nor did he enjoy survival training, which meant living on things you found in the woods. Huckleberries weren't too bad, though it took him an hour to pick a handful, but acorns were strictly for the birds. Martha didn't give him Fritos at home, but Che knew his way around the Safeway and usually spent his allowance there. At Camp Middle Earth there were no Safeways and money wasn't the medium of exchange. You were supposed to trade your skills for stuff, and Che didn't have any except picking his nose.

Furthermore, the camp was a shuck. Middle Earth didn't have any rules, but Che kept breaking them accidentally, just as he had in group this morning when he refused to tell his peers what he'd dreamed about. Expected to record his dreams in a journal, he used up all the pages instead writing letters home begging for Fritos.

Why hadn't he used his smarts and kept a low profile? Two-thirds of the resource persons, male and female, were doing M.A.'s in behavioral psychology. The slightest sign of what they called "maladjusted socialization," and they insisted on friendly, one-to-one raps about his mother's previous four marriages.

Che kept explaining that four ex-husbands weren't unusual where he lived. He even added cleverly that he believed in "growth and change". Nevertheless, they kept coming on at him about "these hangups caused by identity problems". In desperation, Che asked Gregor to "just make up some stuff" for his dreambook, but Gregor was too busy killing chickens. So Che made the mistake of saying he didn't dream.

Camp Middle Earth felt about not dreaming the way Martha felt about not brushing your teeth. Apparently, if you didn't brush your teeth, they rotted and fell right out of your head. Apparently, too, if you didn't dream, you ended up hopelessly insane. Che couldn't get to sleep in his tipi because he was so freaked about meeting his dream quotient.

Now he was scheduled for Hot Seat Work in the encounter group that evening, and when he broke out into a rash, envisioning himself brought to a rolling boil in the hot tub, his Surrogate Parent for the session made him drink a lot of lemon-grass tea. "Listen, Che," said Mountain Man, "you've just made a conscious decision. You're the one that decides to get sick or stay healthy. Listen, you want your body to call the shots?"

Che just wanted the camp to call Martha and tell her he'd forgotten his cortisone ointment. Maybe she'd come and bring it to him and he could hide out in the trunk of the Rover. Otherwise he was in for two more weeks of unstructured freedom that stopped short of "pharmaceuticals" and doing your own thing if your thing was picking your nose.

Glumly, he consulted the bulletin board, listing the afternoon's activities, posted outside the communal yurt : belly dancing, spear fishing and herbal medicine. Che didn't know what herbal medicine was but suspected lemon-grass tea was part of it. His only other choice was pulling organic weeds in the camp's organic garden, a pastime that only helped promote another eggplant lasagne dinner. If he wanted meat, he had to help kill it ; Middle Earth was "into process."

Che crawled back into his tipi and thought about Big Macs in styrofoam boxes, listening furtively to the nearest rock station on his transistor radio, but Mountain Man soon appeared, down on all fours, at the tipi entrance. "Hey, big fella," he said to Che, "why aren't you out there interrelating? This is a community, you dig?"

Guiltily, Che snapped off his radio and stuffed it down into his blanket roll. Middle Earth had no electricity and didn't believe in the media hype.

"I'm just meditating," he said. "Just sort of getting in touch with myself."

"Far out." Mountain Man grinned at him. "You're missing a Spontaneous Rap Session, though. We're putting together the last night's graduation boogie. Your little sister's gonna belly dance, and Gregor said he'd help slaughter a sheep."

Che wished Mountain Man would go away so he could take a nap before they put him in the Hot Seat. Every night, when he finally got to sleep, they woke him up for Spontaneous Midnight Cookie Baking.

"Take your finger out of your nose, man. Nose-picking's, like, uncool, okay?". Mountain Man began crawling toward him, advancing steadily into the tipi. "Whaddaya say we go have a learning experience? Maybe we could build a tree house, you know?"

Che decided to seize the ball and run with it. Among other things, he was terrified of heights. "Mountain Man, I wanna go home," he screamed.

He kept on kicking and screaming like a maniac, with judicious intervals of holding his breath, until Mountain Man finally backed out of the tent. Mountain Man returned with the camp director, Salmon, who'd had to leave the sensory exploration class he was teaching and who chewed Che out for acting like a ten-year-old.

"Yeah, well," Mountain Man said in his defense, "he's only ten years old, you know?"

Eventually, they let him call Martha, but only after he'd held his breath until he turned blue. Che screamed until Martha promised to come and get him and then he threw in his demand for a Frito fix.

"I can't figure out where his head's at," she told Bill, badly shaken after Che's call. "He kept yelling about how eggplant is yucky, and they were going to throw him down out of a tree. And he's paranoid like you wouldn't believe ; he claims they kept him up all night and made him bake carob cookies."

"I'll go get him and you call Steinmetz." Bill already had his car keys in his hand. "God, he really sounds sick, you know? I hope we haven't waited too long to get him in therapy. Imagine a ten-year-old kid that can't handle freedom..."