In what he describes as a “graduation gift” to students facing the chasm of postcollege life, Mark Edmundson’s engaging though rather slight memoir of his twenties searches for deep significance in the wanderings of youth. In 1974, Edmundson leaves Bennington College in Vermont looking for “it,” what he “was tooled for and set to do and to be.” That search for purpose leads him first to a bankrupt, graffiti-scrawled New York City, where in between “living like an aristocratic bum,” he drives a cab and sets up equipment at Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd shows. Later he ventures into the wilds of Colorado with Outward Bound and works as a bouncer at a college-town discotheque, before discovering teaching, his true vocation.
Edmundson—an English professor at the University of Virginia, and author of, among other things, the essential Harper’s essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education”—brings a welcome earnestness to the project, referring to everything from Jacques Lacan to the Rolling Stones. He admirably attempts to write with the yawping gusto of a young fan, but often the teacher in him gets the better of the storyteller, saddling too many tales with a generic moral. His cabbie days show that the rich “have material anxieties in spades,” for instance, while his trip to the Rockies reveals “a vision of nature as a repository of humane and humanizing virtues.” His discovery of university life, finally, leads to this sweeping pronouncement: “Maybe compassion and glory are the potent twin aspirations of the soul.” That may be true—or at least worth considering—but the book’s greatest moments come when Edmundson is at his least professorial, reflecting with a charming, wide-eyed sincerity at the days he spent stalking Woody Allen through the streets of Manhattan, swerving his taxi amid the drunks in Times Square, or perched high on a stack of amps as Jefferson Starship stirred the masses in Central Park.
Time Out New York
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