“The morning was a fish in a net, glistening and wriggling at the dead black border of her consciousness, but she’d never caught fish in a net or on a hook either, so she really couldn’t really say if or how or why.”
I read this years ago, and I more or less liked it, but I don’t think I understood it much. Or rather, it’s a perfectly understandable novel, but maybe you need some of the cynicism and realism of your 30s to seep in before being able to see some of the shades here, or at least I did.
This novel begins on a hippie commune in California where drugs and free-love are the laws of the land. And by laws, I almost do mean laws. We understand very early on that free-love is a kind of imperative here, and at least one of the women seems to understand how much of a trap it is for her and her kind, and how much of a boon it is for the men. And free-love also turns out to not feel as free, for example, when the men on the commune have to contend with a new group of Black men joining up and maybe thinking they don’t want the love to be as free as they thought. When an incident brings the local authorities to their doorstep, they decide to pack up and move to Alaska, where things are freer?
We’ve spent some time already in Alaska meeting a man named Sess, a trapper who is trained to live off the land in a rural cabin, and his new wife. A recent spat regarding this new wife and another local man has led to some significant danger entering into their lives.
As these two storylines slowly coalesce, we start to see the contrast between someone who is well-suited but still faces the dangers of the Alaskan bush, and a bunch of people who mistake scrapping by with the help of welfare and charity as self-sufficiency.