Word: houriet
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...Houriet (Avon) Our Gang by Philip Roth (Bantam...
More disciplined communes had better luck. Houriet describes the evolution of New Buffalo, between Albuquerque and Santa Fe in New Mexico, which painfully expelled the hordes of parasitic potheads who had drifted in to live off the efforts of a hard-working minority. A different proposition is Harrad West,* a six-member group-marriage web in Berkeley, Calif. Houriet, who notes regretfully that he missed its "honeymoon" phase, found unsettling resemblances to an erotic soap opera. One feature was "the Chart," which ordained who was to sleep with whom on any particular night. "There's really no other...
Getting Back Together is probably the best account so far on the movement, partly because Author Houriet retains a certain amount of wry detachment, though the book also records his own deepening involvement with the experiments-an interest that finally led him to found his own community in northern Vermont. It was not an easy metamorphosis for "Robert the Writer" when the eternal problems of real sharing appeared. "I was unwilling to let go of what was mine," he writes, "my car, my money, my wife." After considerable agonizing, he managed to lose most of his hang-ups on personal...
...Neither Houriet nor Diamond pretends to be a prophet of a green new order, and neither really spells out just where he believes the movement is heading. It is enough for both that these "alternatives" exist and flourish, after a fashion and for a while. Perhaps it is just as well that the authors have chosen not to brood on the history of communal societies in the U.S. Few have lasted long; those that endured often lost much of the founding spirit, and came to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the society they had abandoned...
Already the world outside is pressing in on many of the new communes. "South of us," writes Houriet, "Interstate 91 is being blasted through the hills. At night, part of the sky glows an eerie green from the towers of light over a supermarket parking lot. A few years ago, we were safe in Vermont from the urban monster. Now, we're not so sure...