I’m only about thirty years late in doing so, but I’d like to express my great appreciation for Julian Barnes’s 1980 novel Metroland. It’s likely already familiar to our English friends on this blog, but I’ve just read it for the first time after having seen the second half of the 1997 movie version on Sundance Channel. Ironically, I missed the first part as I was watching the eternal Casablanca, probably for the twentieth time, on Turner Classic Movies. The older movie promised me that I’d always have Paris, but when it ended, I switched over to Sundance to see what was on, and found myself right in the middle of the frantic Paris of 1968, no less, where a young English guy (just about my age at the time) is involved in a passionate affair with a French woman he’s met while studying there.
Christopher loses his virginity and many of his adolescent illusions in his affair with Annick, though they break up rather soon, and eventually he marries an English woman, Marion, whom he’s also met in that fateful Paris of 1968. Their 1970′s marriage is happy, but this in turn causes alienation between Chris and his old friend Toni, who’s an attenuated hippy still looking for things to rebel against, and who thinks Chris has sold out to the bourgeois community of Metroland, the outerbelt suburbs of London.
I was excited enough just by the second half of the Metroland movie to want to read the novel on which it was based, and my public library obliged me. I found myself identifying even more with Christopher’s persona in the novel, as that same “bourgeois” question had haunted me in the early ’70s, when I naively wondered if I could become a rockwriter without indulging aspects of the ruling counterculture that didn’t interest me (especially the drugs some of my rockcritical idols seemed to favor.)
Well, I did get aboard at Creem, where I discovered all levels of such indulgence or non-indulgence among my fellows; we were all writers first of all, which is what counted. By about 1977, I was established as a freelancer at the magazine, yet my profile was almost identical to Chris’s, as outlined in Metroland: ”Age: Thirty/Married: Yes/Children: One/Job: One/House: Yes/With mortgage: Yes (Rock solid so far/Car: Arguable . . . Prospects: Bloody better be/Happiness: Oh, yes; and if not now, then never.” As an American, I was of course required by law to own and operate a car at all times — a rather dependable ’69 VW Beetle then — but otherwise Chris’s list of bourgeois baggage above literally fit all of mine. The fact that both Julian Barnes and I were born in 1946 probably explains some of the simultaneity. Sorry, Toni, if I’d known of this wonderful novel in 1980, the sense of post-hippy vindication I would have derived from it would have epated you like crazy.
What amazes me now, thinking back forty years, is how simple the bourgeois/hippy choice could be for a guy coming out of college in the late ’60s. Except for the pesky military draft we Yanks had to put up with at the time, the economic choice was easy. If you had a bachelor’s degree in anything, it wasn’t hard at all to find a decent-paying, tolerable job; if, instead, you wanted to remain outside the “establishment,” you could essay a bohemian life off the fat of the land without breaking too much sweat. America, anyway, was still riding on its World War II economic boom in the late ’60s. That finally began to run down in the ’70s, when I’d already made my bourgeois-writing-for-a-punk-magazine beach landing, and I hate to think about the stark economic choices today’s college graduates have to face. Those were actually some sweet times in our own Metrolands. Thanks for reminding me, Julian. Now I need to score the DVD and see the entire movie version . . .
