Spring Street Summer: The Search for a Lost Paradise

Novelist Hudson ( Columbo Heat ) here combines roseate youthful memories of California in the '70s with his later adult sensibilities. In 1976, he left the University of Chicago for Santa Cruz under the aegis of a fellowship enabling him to research concepts of paradise in Western thought. In a beautiful hillside house with idyllic gardens high above the sea and townscape, Hudson explored his own personal Western paradise. He shared this with a group of bright, attractive young academics riding the heady wave of liberated relationships. At first bewildered and shocked by their casual sexuality, he quickly adjusted, loosened up, fell in love and gloried in his edenic situation. Fifteen years later, the memory of that time leads him to return and look for house and housemates, and he recalls those beatific days now played against other concepts of paradise. Using the third person and the designation ``C'' when telling his youthful story, Hudson switches to first person when looking back as an adult. He finds his friends not so much changed as seen from an altered focus and with a surer sense of his own nature as well as of theirs. His meditations on the gap between perception and reality are just one satisfying part of this engaging book. (Nov.)