PAGAN TIMEAn American ChildhoodBy Micah PerksCounterpoint: 162...

PAGAN TIME

An American Childhood

By Micah Perks

Counterpoint: 162 pp., $23

Those fabulous ‘60s. The drugs. The beatings. The riots. Remember? Well, that’s kind of what Micah Perks’ memoir of growing up in a hippie commune in Vermont is like.

Perks’ parents ran a school for disturbed adolescents but spent most of their time, according to the author, acting like disturbed adolescents. Thankfully, there’s almost no philosophizing in the book, about going back to the land or about wilderness or our own wild natures. That would be redundant.

The stories Perks remembers, from age 5 to the present, defy what we call parenthood, society and sometimes even gravity. To her parents’ credit, whatever their philosophy or religion, their ideas are immediately transformed into action: erecting a tepee village, setting sail on Lake Champlain for days of fishing and drinking (including the disturbed adolescents), killing and eating only wild food: grouse, bear, venison; sex in the open, and with whomever you like, open meetings, open rooms, open psyches.

All of that sounds like great fun, but through Perks’ young eyes, it is a confusing swirl of activity. Most of all, it is precarious. Any child can sense it, and longs to be the same as everyone else. Perks’ father is the ringleader, a British charismatic who thinks he is a sea captain. That is his least harmful delusion. Also, he can’t stop having sex outside of marriage.

And for all the openness, it is finally sex that brings down the house. It’s her parents’ open marriage that pulls the commune and the family apart.

But it was not all in vain, all that risk and defiance. One feels the wheels of evolution groaning. Perks’ mother seems a seriously wise person, and Perks herself, though she has chosen not, outwardly, to live as her parents did, has a beautiful lack of judgment.

There is a little too much mythologizing about that time in her life, especially about her father; but more off-putting to the reader is Perks’ neediness. She begins the book on an almost whiny note: I need you to see this, I need you to understand, she repeats again and again. Why? Why me? Some tales are told for the teller, more than for the audience, and “Pagan Time” is one of them.

*

THE ARTIFICIAL SILK GIRL

By Irmgard Keun

Translated from the German by Kathie von Ankum

Other Press: 192 pp., $17 paper

“The Artificial Silk Girl,” written in 1932 by Irmgard Keun, then 23, was blacklisted a year later by the Nazis for its anti-German portrayals of businessmen and bureaucrats. In the 1950s, it was resurrected as a feminist manifesto; the diary of a working girl in Depression-era Berlin.

Damned by the Nazis, hailed by the feminists. You’d think there’s hardly anything left to say about the poor novel, except that it is a truly charming window into a young woman’s life in the early 1930s.

Doris, the main character, decides to write a book about herself. “Not a diary, that’s ridiculous for a trendy girl like me.” No, Doris’ life can only be fully captured in a movie, and so Doris tries to see her world as if through the lens of a camera. She tries to be as precise and descriptive as a camera would be.

Doris is a secretary in an attorney’s office when the book opens. Every time she’s caught for missing a comma or some other infraction, she gives him a “sensuous look,” which she knows can only go on until he loses control. Sex for Doris is a defiant act against the pettiness of bureaucrats, and this gives the book a cabaret feel: wild sex in the middle of perverse cruelty.

“Politics poisons human relationships. I spit on it,” she writes when an industrialist drops her because she tells him she’s Jewish (even though she isn’t). Her world, seen from cafes and restaurants more than the office, is full of “jerks,” “fatsoes,” “turtles” and other epithets not reserved for the men she sleeps with.

It is poignant that Doris thinks she is savvier than she is, but she makes up for it with raw energy. Even such phrases as “dog tired” reveal her boundless joie de vivre.

Early in the novel, Doris moves to Berlin to pursue an acting career. “Berlin descended on me like a comforter with a flaming floral design,” she purrs.

She mocks the young women who rely on the professed connections of men to get them acting work, but she must use this vehicle herself. In the end, you know what brings down a woman like this: LOVE. “Love for love’s sake is exhausting,” she writes. Love is the only thing that gets between Doris and her dreams. Working makes her dog-tired. Love exhausts her.