Word: maynards
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...Many of Maynard's observations on those times, while pleasantly nostalgic, are obvious and trite. "College is not right for everyone," she points out. "The Beatles gave us something more than music." "Why do looks matter so much?" she wants to know. Others, though, are aphoristic and revealing. Somehow, she tells us, she could never imagine Jackie Kennedy going to the bathroom. Abandoning "relevance" to set up a prom, "we knew just enough to feel guilty, like trick-or-treaters nervously passing a ghost with a UNICEF box in his hand...
Negotiating with those persistent guilt feelings is what aged us so tragically early, Maynard concludes. Commitments only brought disappointments. We're tired, she despairs, jaded by reports of atrocities, bored by information, haunted by our failures...
...worse than the despair of the sixties is the indifference and self-deception with which Maynard approaches the seventies. "I had visions of good works," she writes. "Now my goal is simpler. I want to be happy. And I want comfort... I'll vote and I'll give to charity, but I won't give myself. I have a sudden desire to buy land... a kind of fall-out shelter, I guess. As some people prepare for their old age, so I prepare for my twenties. A little house, a comfortable chair, peace and quiet -- retirement sounds tempting...
...world but from watching it on television. But we could always turn the TV off or put aside a magazine, and essentially ignore both the war and the world. Safe within the TV-bred confidence that everything will turn out all right by the end of the half-hour, Maynard handles the information flood that shows no signs of ebbing by retreating to the blind trust of earlier times, by pleading ignorance, by turning inward...
MORE THAN ANY crisis, the broad embracing of Joyce Maynard and her weariness worries me. Her lesson, according to one reviewer, is that "if you buy what the media are selling, you get shoddy, short-lived goods, that the task of the times may be to close one's mind to the flow of easy symbols and pre-packaged interpretations." Maynard is being peddled by the media as our sage, and her introspection, though appealing, is directionless, as she readily admits. Now that Maynard has accumulated a following of the wornout, there doesn't seem to be anyplace to lead...