LIBERAL PARENTS, RADICAL CHILDREN

The epistolary preamble ""A Letter to the Young"" is an admitted deadfall--there are others in this almost too heartfelt dialgoue on the cleavage between those concerned, enlightened, liberal, middle-class parents and their children who are not in ""good shape."" But the opening letter, for all its emotional apostrophizing, does make two of the sharper points here: the young are more than unusually incapable of coping with difficulty, and they have been so ""adamant"" and ""self-regarding"" in their demands. What follows is a composite of four prevalent types who have graced The Scene: the dropout, the pothead, the sexual revolutionist, the communard. You'll recognize them easily; you either know them from your own homes or those of friends or from the media or from novels. In fact sometimes they're written up as they are in bad novels (""He could not keep his hands off her, and she reveled in the daring and abandon with which he took hold of her breasts or ran his hand up her thigh in public""). Throughout of course there's the great regret that these young people indulged in everything and found nothing--and the solace that much of this psychic anarchy is on the way out.