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Book review: The Sixties
Non-fiction: An honest account of the most ‘over-remembered decade in history’ from someone who lived through it
Can there really be room for another personal take on the most "over-remembered" decade in history, asked Kate Kellaway in the Observer? Jenny Diski's new book shows that there certainly can.
In her wry memoir, Diski, now 61, "somehow manages to be old and young at the same time. She sends herself up but has respect for the person that she was" - a Biba-wearing, drug-taking, Vietnam-protesting stalwart of the counter-culture. Her description of how her generation tried and failed to change the world is "funny and unsettling" - particularly as regards the "oppressive aspects of the permissive society".
The Sixties offers ample evidence that "string-free, zipless partner-swapping" was a rotten idea, especially for women, said Irma Kurtz in the Guardian. "We set up communes," writes Diski, "sharing the washing-up and each other's lovers." The result was "a terrible mess and a lot of anger - regarding both the washing-up and the sex".
No one has written better about the contempt with which the author and her like viewed the "straight" world, said Andrew Lycett in the Sunday Telegraph. She shows how drugs created a "paranoid togetherness, reinforcing the view that the outside world was unreal while one's own hallucinatory perceptions about society and its discontents were the only reality".
The book makes for compelling reading on subjects of which Diski has first-hand experience, said Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times. These include the "excesses of progressive education" - the author set up a free school in her own north London flat - and the absurdities of radical psychiatry. And she is admirably candid about how little her generation achieved: "no new ideas, no great books or paintings or poetry".
Yet Diski lapses into cliche in bashing the "grey" 1950s for their "lack of colour" (that decade, remember, saw the advent of the affluent society, the birth of television and rock 'n' roll, and the sale of hundreds of thousands of sex manuals). The real problem with this memoir is that what the author remembers as "the Sixties" was in truth confined to a small minority of highly educated students and graduates.
"To be fair, Diski herself eventually concedes this point." Yet even now, "after admitting that most of her contemporaries led very different lives, she can hardly bring herself to mention them. No wonder she was so shocked when they voted for Mrs Thatcher."
The Sixties, by Jenny Diski, 143pp (Profilee, £10.99) The Week Bookshop £9.89 (incl p&p) ·
