ALTHER, Lisa
US Novelist (born 1944)
KINFLICKS (1976) The 'autobiography' of Ginny Babcock, a typical' US adolescent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The book sends up every cliché of the genre and of the period: Ginny spends her high school years jerking off a muscle-brained football star, discovers lesbian love at university, joins protest marches, takes up macrobiotic diets, zen and LSD, marries, has a child and divorces - and treats each experience as if she were the first person in the world ever to discover it, as if she were hypnotised by her own adventurousness. Alther intersperses Ginny's first-person narrative with chapters set ten years further on, when Ginny visits her dying mother in hospital, trying to come to terms with her feelings about herself, her family and her future. These sections give the book a harsher, more elegiac tone: the young Ginny symbolises a whole adolescent generation, as rebellious and zestful as any other but engulfed by the age they live in.
Alther's second novel, Original Sins (1980), similarly blends satire, slapstick and irony. A 1980s equivalent to Mary McCarthy's The Group, it traces the experience of five childhood friends as they grow to adulthood, discovering in the process civil rights, the women's movement and the pleasures and preposterousness of the sexual revolution. Other Women (1985), a less larky exploration of women's experience in the last generation, counterpoints the lives of two utterly different people, a "flower-child' depressed at the first wiltings of middle age and the prickings of lesbianism, and her English psychiatrist.
READ ON
Bedrock
To Kinflicks : John Irving, The World According to Garp Marge Piercy, The High Cost of Living Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint Philip Roth, Letting Go Aritha Van Herk, No Fixed Address
To Original Sins : Rona Jaffe, Class Reunion Mary McCarthy, The Group
To Other Women : Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs
more :Tags Pathways Themes & Places