Paradise Fever: Growing Up in the Shadow of the New Age

My husband and I rarely like the same books, but we both loved this one--the most amazing story of a childhood like no other. Reading this book is a bit like watching a car wreck; you can't turn away. (That's a compliment, if you can't tell.)

By turns hilarious and haunting, this memoir about growing up on the furtherest fringes of the New Age achieves a crazy kind of balance--a tilt-a-whirl balance. It's not a simply an expose of New Age self-absorption and infantilism (though it certainly is that). It's written by someone trying to make sense of his own wacky childhood experience, and trying to capture what was wonderful and not-so-wonderful about his fantastical father. What comes through is the author's basic sanity. The elder Tompkins is completely at home in the subterranean, labyrinthine byways of the occult. The author isn't--for all his drug and alcohol abuse, his feet are planted in this world. What struck me was how his feelings and attitudes and speculations about his father seemed so universal. Improbably, I saw my own, completely average, un-New Age dad in the elder Tompkins. The author gets at the essential mysteriousness of our fathers.

I hadn't heard about this book, but I saw it on a table at the store and liked the weird cover. Now I see by the reviews that other people know how sensational it is. No, sensational is the wrong word. It's an unsensational -- but sensationally funny -- book about a sensational time. It's a book for anyone who has thought, "Wouldn't it have been great to grow up on a commune among really progresive people?" Well, I still wish I had, but now I see how those good, utopian ideals can get all mixed up with self-interest and create something really screwy -- in this case the guy who wrote this book! I can't think of another book that's so affectionate, satirical, and bitter at the same time. Actually, the bitterness swamps the last section, where the guy is all messed up on alcohol and heroin. I'm not sure if I think this part is as successful -- it kind of takes the air out of the proceedings. That said, I think he WANTED to take the air out of the book, to rub your face in all the ugly consequences of "the New Age." I love this book in the way some people said they loved The Ice Storm; it's better than The Ice Storm.

Hysterically funny yet seriously disturbing. It all seemed cosmically profound and great fun at the time, but those of us enmeshed in the zeitgeist of the 70s can look back now through Ptolemy's eyes and see our sins and selfishness clearly. Fortunately, Ptolemy seems to have recovered from the damage we inflicted on his generation. He has a sublime sense of humor and an attitude of gratitude. The generations before Ptolemy's have made amends and in some cases, they have been accepted.

I wasn't sure what sort of book I was looking to read. I entered my interests into BookMatcher--I love Science Fiction and Fantasy, I'm a sucker for Popular Fiction, and anything about Atlantis or inscrutable, patriarchal figures and shark fishing and I'm over the moon. A few seconds waiting while BookMatcher did its thing and BAM, out it types Paradise Fever. Boy, did BookMatcher steer me right. This is a fantastic memoir about growing up in the dark, dank, fetid soul of the New Age. A fantastic read for anyone who has ever gagged on the pungent whiff of pathouli in a crowded natural bakery or suffered through an involunatary chakra reading at a red-meat free dinner party. Tompkins, in retelling the story of his boyhood, captures the inanity and dissolution that passed for culture during the dawn of the New Age. The best memoir of the year, no question.