Books: Old Folks at Home

THEY by Marya Marines. 215 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

Not long ago, Critic-at-Large Marya Mannes justly observed that in a world taken over by size 10 miniskirts and baby body stockings there is little left to clothe the “well-kept figure of an adult woman still loved by a man.” This becoming feminine pique over fit—and much other comment on the trying 60s—has been incorporated into a slender futurist fantasy. The publisher, somewhat optimistically, asserts that it is a novel. Alas, the lady has tried to cram a statuesque symposium on life, death and manners into a minisheath of story.

Technocrats. “They” are the young. By 1980, They have taken over the country from bomb-happy right-wingers. Justly loathing the Establishment, fearing the infection of its diseased cultural tradition, They have become sensation-bound technocrats. One of their earliest decrees is that everyone over 50 must live apart from society. Most of the aged are consigned to public institutions to await death—from either natural causes or pills and injections called “compilers.” A few old folks who have made notable contributions in the arts or sciences are permitted to live on in their own homes, provided they are far enough away from population centers not to contaminate anyone.

Naturally, Marya Mannes, thinly disguised as a bright, sixtyish, musically inclined writer named Kate, winds up like that, in her family’s year-round beach house. Along with her is an aging cross section of the New York cultural scene: a ham-fisted objective painter and his ex-model wife, a famous composer of Broadway show tunes, a celebrated ex-Viennese conductor.

The group decides to die together when the time comes, instead of waiting for the agency truck to pick them up. Meanwhile, they will leave a record of their comments on the generation gap, their values, a personal account of what they loved most. Set down by Kate, this testament is liveliest when it reflects Marya Mannes’ own penchant for high-class invective. During their sex talks, the painter howl—, “Don’t tell me the sexual revolution was made by those pre-nubile, fur-bearing match-sticks!”

Humanist Trinity. But Kate’s assessment suffers when she tries to defend such stoic values as “Discipline, Responsibility, and Grace”—a humanist trinity of behavior that at times can be confused with Repression, Conformity and Manners.

Courageous, only occasionally embarrassing, They communicates best the troubling reflections of a liberal generation that worked for change and revolution only to find the results horrifying. We were caught, one character observes, “between the Puritan and the pornographer.” Calculated to attract the young, the book will most touch the middleaged. Better read than talked about, it will no doubt be more talked about than read.