★★★★★ Not nostalgic for the sixties

The Drifters

James A Michener

I was born in 1955, and therefore was a kid and young teenager in the sixties. (OK, Boomer.) In past years I frequently met up with people my age who who would tell me how they missed the sixties. I have never felt this way. I found them painful, at the time and equally so in memory. Yes we had the Beatles and civil rights legislation. And Vietnam and Four Dead in Ohio. It seemed like everyone was constantly angry and in a state of loudly expressed outrage, and a truly desperate and sincere feeling that those other folks were bringing us to destruction. In fact, no time in my experience was as upsetting and unpleasant as the sixties, until Donald Trump became president of the USA in 2021. Since then life in the USA has become miserable, but familiar. This is what the sixties felt like to me.

I preface my review with that explanation because The Drifters portrays the way the sixties felt to a kid or teenager (or, at least, to me) better than any other book I can name. It was the last conventional novel James A. Michener wrote before turning to what he would eventually become most famous for. His next published novel was Centennial, a deeply researched historical saga telling the history of a Colorado town from geological time to the present. After that his works consisted almost entirely of such sagas.

The Drifters, which I came to after reading several of Michener's historical sagas, tells the story of a diverse group of six teenagers/young adults in the sixties. However, Michener himself, or someone rather like him, is also a character. It is told in the first person by a childless older man, conservative and comfortably wealthy, who tries to understand the kids, and very obviously and convincingly loves them deeply. He is a sort of mentor to them, although he understands that they tolerate him more than they respect him. But tolerate him they do, and they let him into their lives to an extent. The kids travel around the world -- well, mainly Europe and North Africa -- there's lots of drugs and sex and rock and roll, and of course Vietnam is a constant presence in their minds.

If that sounds uncomfortable, well, yeah -- that's why it's such a great novel. (If it doesn't sound uncomfortable, you are not correctly perceiving how a conservative older guy sees all this.) The sixties were an uncomfortable conflictful time, much like the one we live in now. And The Drifters is an uncomfortable conflictful novel.

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