You can read anything at the beach. I live in a seaside university town, and it’s not uncommon to see bikini-clad students devouring Crime and Punishment or Principles of Political Economics through sunglasses. Of course, this works the other way, too. The first time I read my undisputed beach favourite — the one that checks every breezy box associated with the genre — I was not lying on sand under a hot sun.
It must have been August, let’s say… 1980. The phrase “beach read” was a decade away from being coined (it only emerged as a marketing tool in 1990). I was 13, and had spent July at summer camp. While I was away, my uncle Ted — a writer who often received free books from publishers and newspapers — stayed in my room for a few days and left on my bedside table a copy of California Generation by Jacqueline Briskin. There is no way that Uncle Ted, who rightfully fancied himself an intellectual, read this novel before giving it to me. He probably glanced at the first page to see that it featured high-school students, and thought I might like it.
The cover promised “SUN, SIN, AND SEDUCTION”. And the back-cover blurb: “They’re the California Generation. The golden spoiled youth in a sun-drenched land of dreams — where the stars come out at night to see and be seen, where money, beauty, and sex pave the way to success, and where everyone hopes to ride off into the sunset…”
Briskin’s novel doesn’t disappoint: it delivers almost every kind of sex you can imagine — or, at least, every kind you could have imagined in 1980. But it’s more than just another bonkbuster (a portmanteau that was coined later, in 1989). There’s counter-culture rioting, lots of adultery, and several abortions. It also features a good deal of drugs, including an LSD trip where a dandelion communicates the secrets of the universe.
Did my parents object to me reading about such precocious topics? Did my father phone his brother to rebuke him for leaving wildly inappropriate material in my room? The answer to both questions is a resounding no.
My parents always let me read whatever I wanted. Our living room was lined with bookshelves containing everything from a complete collection of The World Book Encyclopedia to Fear of Flying, and I was free to help myself. Once, when I was staying at a friend’s house, her father caught us reading Judy Blume’s Forever. He roundly scolded us both (“You will not read this kind of trash in my house!”) before confiscating the book. I was fantastically jealous; it would have been much more fun to read Forever if I’d had to sneak around to do so.
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