Going Nowhere Sideways

Energetic, fictive diary entries track one woman's 1960s and '70s in this engaging, well-constructed first novel. Molly Williams is 40 and near suicide when she begins rereading the journals she started in 1969; the story they tell comprises most of the novel. Young Molly, a sheltered Connecticut WASP, sees her New York boyfriend kissing a man, flees him and finds herself at Woodstock, where she drops acid, flips out and gets help from a sensitive Chinese-American man called Johnson, who becomes her long-term companion. Back in New York City, Molly immerses herself in late-hippie culture, works at a New Age bookstore, embraces the goal of ""unconditional love."" She follows Johnson and his young son to a farm in Pennsylvania owned by Johnson's neurotic wife, Mathilda. By 1979, Johnson has become an altruistic lawyer, working against pollution and for Native Americans; Molly considers his politics self-serving, and his desire for another child a ruse to defeat Mathilda. The disillusioned Molly becomes involved with Nancy, a celebrated photographer. Later journals cover downtown New York's sex-and-art scenes, and the frightening advent of AIDS. Curran, an actress and playwright (The Lunch Girls; Alternations) has made her first novel partly a tour of its decades' zeitgeists, and mostly a story of slow growing-up. It asks, and shows, how a young woman of Molly's obvious intelligence could be exposed to so much '60s altruism and yet lack a sense of who she is. Curran's prose maneuvers ably between the requirements of narrative drive and the improvised feel of real journals; interpolated present-tense scenes give Molly's story a satisfying conclusion. Readers may want to shake Molly at times, but they'll enjoy sharing most of her trip. (Apr.)