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Rating:
More than a real novel, it's a screenplay, from which the eponymous film by Al Ashby (1971) was indeed made, becoming a cult movie over time, while the original idea—this sarcastic little work by Colin Higgins—is what has been forgotten. It deserves a reread, if not precisely a rediscovery, because within the slender plot of an impossible love between a wealthy post-adolescent searching for himself and an eccentric seventy-nine-year-old with a lot of life experience lies all the transgressive spirit of those years. The dense series of dialogues between the protagonists and the liveliness of the imagined scenarios depict a sort of counterculture that, in the absurdity of situations, opposes the rules and figures of good society: the school and bourgeois family and then the priest, the policeman, the general, and the psychologist, quickly leading to a surprise ending where the transition of a lifetime seems to be concentrated in the bequest of a symbolic object like a ring of passkey because after opening one door (coincidentally, Jim Morrison died just that year), there’s always another one. It’s truly the hippie spirit of the flower children with the addition of a holistic view of life in which everything transforms and death is merely a passage. «We begin to die as soon as we are born. What is so strange about death? It's not a surprise. It's part of life. It's transformation.» Still relevant and very New Age. Who knows (I'd like to hope) if good Colin Higgins remembered this dialogue before leaving us due to AIDS not yet fifty. Read (or reread) this book not to forget him and perhaps discover among his other works still some light and ironic gems.
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