"We Had It So Good"

I find myself drawn to novels about my generation, those of us who were adolescents and young adults in the l960s and 1970s (OK, yes, the Baby Boomers…). For all the good and bad of those years, and there was plenty of both, I think most of us still feel that they were a sort of Golden Age. Linda Grant captures this feeling in her novel “We Had It So Good” (Scribner, 2011). Her protagonist, Stephen, an American who moved to England, often romanticizes this period in his life. His wife, Andrea, is more pragmatic and is glad that they have since then achieved a comfortable, upper middle class life. His hedonist friend, Ivan, happily enjoys the “best” of both lives: his habits from the sixties and his comforts from his later adult life. The fourth main character, Grace, is a bit of a lost soul; she is, on the one hand, an independent woman who travels everywhere and acts on her ideals, but on the other hand, always needs a man in her life, and doesn’t really get along well with anyone except her old friend Andrea. These four met when they were all at Oxford, Stephen as a Rhodes Scholar (who met Bill Clinton, another Rhodes Scholar, on the ship from the U.S. to England) and the others as English students. We also learn about Stephen and Andrea’s two children, Marianne and Max, each with her/his own complicated life, and Stephen’s father, Si, who is deeply loving but has his own secrets. But the main focus is on the Boomer generation, and how they come to terms with growing older and, eventually, encounter illness and mortality. They – especially Stephen – have led (mostly) charmed lives (thus the title) and can hardly believe that they too are subject to these calamities. One other point that becomes clear is that those who have had loving parents and happy childhoods are positively influenced by these their whole lives; the only problem is that they, as in Stephen’s example, are not really prepared for anything to go wrong in their lives. This situation really resonates with me. An intriguingly dissonant aspect of this novel, for me, was that I didn’t really connect much with any individual character -- well, maybe a bit with Stephen -- and I found the characters a bit complacent, but on the other hand, I connected a lot with the generational aspect and dilemmas. At the end of the book, Stephen thinks, “I don’t understand. How does it come to this? We were supposed to be so special, we were going to change everything and it turns out we’re just the same….” This novel is an absorbing read, especially for those of the Boomer generation.