THE EDEN EXPRESS: A Memoir of Insanity

THE EDEN EXPRESS: A Memoir of Insanity. By Mark Vonnegut. Seven Stories. 301 pp. $13.95 paper

First it was the constant crying. Then the trees were angry at him. Out of nowhere came the wrinkled, iridescent face. When he threw a cue ball at a window, his hippie friends called his famous novelist father, who got him to a mental institution. Mark Vonnegut had two more breakdowns, but after Thorazine shots and electroshock therapy, he was cured, never to be schizophrenic again.

When this account of Vonnegut’s illness first appeared, in 1975, it was a rarity. At the time, the only other memoir of schizophrenia was Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (1951), by an author who, with pre-Jerry Springer delicacy, had given only her first name, Renée. Since Vonnegut’s book, the schizophrenic memoir subcategory has blossomed: Jane Rittmayer’s Lifetime (1979), Lori Schiller’s The Quiet Room (1994), Ken Steele’s The Day the Voices Stopped (2001), and even Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader Christina Alexandra’s Five Lost Years (2000).

Vonnegut’s book differs from all of them. He intends Eden Express to be something of an apologia for the 1960s—"We were not the spaced-out, flaky, self-absorbed, wimpy, whiny flower children depicted in movies and TV shows.... Things eventually went bad, but before they went bad hippies did a lot of good. Brave, honest, and true, they paid a price." The majority of the book describes the commune Vonnegut and other 1969 graduates of Swarthmore College set up on an old farm in remote British Columbia. They raise goats, repair a house, live off the land (sort of but not really), eat (mostly) macrobiotic vegetarian food, take mescaline and LSD, and, of course, smoke buckets of marijuana.

The Eden Express’s biggest difference from the rest of the madhouse memoirs is that the author’s father is a counterculture giant, one whose best novels are animated by dark absurdity. Father and son share affinities and contradictions, but this book leaves them untouched. It seems only to say, "Look what happens when you have a dad who’s a hippie icon in an era when anything goes—you go crazy! But not so fast. Hippiedom was harmless. Look, I got better and wrote a book about it. We were right all along!"

The confessional and harrowing particularity of the current memoir craze would have helped Eden Express. This book about intense feelings lacks feeling. Vonnegut never comes to life. He advances a cockamamie theory that multivitamins

cured him of schizophrenia, though he disavows it in an afterword written for this edition—he did, after all, go on to Harvard Medical School and become a pediatrician—and admits that he wasn’t really schizophrenic, but manic depressive.

In the end, there is a pervasive sense of falseness here, a maddening skimming of surfaces while purporting to get to the deepest interiors. Not very brave, not completely honest, Mark Vonnegut never paid much of a price for the 1960s. For brave honesty, read "Letter from Birmingham Jail," not this pseudopsychiatric memoir full of wimpy, whiny flower children.

—Lorraine Adams