LOOSE CHANGE: Three Women of the Sixties

Once upon a time there were three little girls, Susie, Tasha, and Sara. They went to Berkeley and joined a sorority in 1961. But the times they were a-changin' and the answer was blowing in the wind. Soon they discovered ""The History of Ideas! E1 Greco! Erik Erikson!"" and picket lines and sex and Truffaut and LSD and flower power and Paris and Karl Marx and meditation and Tai-Chi. They pledged themselves to taking risks, to growing; they scorned convention. Each was anointed with a special light: Tasha was poetry and art, Susie was ideology, and Sara, who wrote this book, was ""psychological perception""--would that some of it were in evidence here. Tasha conquered the New York art world and had a long-term affair with Mark the sculptor; Susie married Jeff the Berkeley radical and had a child but never an orgasm until she was liberated by a vibrator; Tasha married Michael, a disc jockey, tried analysis, became a journalist and cynic, grew worshipful of Ram Dass, divorced Michael, and began writing this book. The leitmotif is: ""What went wrong? All these bright, idealistic, committed people--how could they have miscalculated so badly? . . . Were our perceptions wrong?"" So much floundering, so much soul-searching, so many sexy men who didn't pan out, so many cliches about the Sixties and What It All Meant. ""Far out!"" may have been the goal but the result is shot through with bourgeois values, and terrifically banal.