We Had It So Good, by Linda Grant, Virago, $29.99
The title sums it all up, We Had It So Good, and oh yes they did. This is the familiar but fascinating story of the baby boomers, and their journey from sweet self-absorbed hippies to a lost self-absorbed middle age.
It’s 1968 and Californian Stephen Newman travels to Oxford on a science scholarship, bright, confident and eager for adventure. There he meets two beauties on campus, Andrea and Grace, who fancy themselves as the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.
We Had It So Good follows them through the drug-induced hallucinations of the ’60s, the dirty squats of the ’70s, and the emerging family life and career aspirations of the ’80s.
This is a bold book about life with a capital L, but it is written close-up — life in lower case. Linda Grant succeeds in showing us the inner lives of three compelling characters, while looking at them, and their generation, from afar.
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