A Boomer’s Tale, Critically Told

MY SKY BLUE TRADES

Growing Up Counter in a

Contrary Time

By Sven Birkerts

Viking

$24.95, 280 Pages

Happily, Sven Birkerts’ memoir, “My Sky Blue Trades,” is not an exercise in boomer nostalgia--though Birkerts, an essayist and literary critic, did come of age in the turbulent ‘60s, did hitch his way to Woodstock and did attend the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where the confluence of liberal learning and liberal times created countless ways to express one’s disaffection with society.

Birkerts flirted with hippiedom, but he didn’t go much further than blowing off classes, experimenting with hallucinogens and bumming around Europe. (OK, he also met Wavy Gravy).

Though his book is subtitled “Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time,” don’t mistake it for the confessions of an ex-radical. Rather, what is most counter about Birkerts--and what comprises the pingpong of his identity crisis--is his Latvian heritage on the one hand, the deeply felt family history that made him feel like an outsider in the Detroit suburbs where he grew up, and his resistance to the middle-class values that made him an outsider at home.

With “My Sky Blue Trades,” Birkerts turns his critical skills--he is a regular contributor to such publications as Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Review of Books and the author of “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”--onto his own life, delving not just into his past but that of his parents and grandparents.

He chooses what he pleases, concerned not too much with hard dates and facts, and guided not so much by the critical events of his life (although there are those too), as the sense of destiny that guided “a good part of my adult life, especially through the long period of my twenties.”

No matter how drained of significance his days seemed, Birkerts knew there was a reason he was pushing a broom down a college corridor or sorting titles in a bookstore. He knew he was going to be a writer, but not before years of writerly aimlessness--sometimes exuberant, sometimes benign.

His college and post-college years are the most entertaining portions of the book, with Birkerts dreaming of himself as the Henry Miller of “Tropic of Cancer,” describing his relationships with women and the stabs at writing in shabby studio apartments.

But such is Birkerts’ reverence for the written word that he sometimes overwrites. He doesn’t just wake up, he drifts into “first wakefulness.” He recalls his discovery of rock ‘n’ roll at a time in his life “when I was so focused on discerning what might be next, that I registered the first tremors, the original signals of what would be an eruption unlike anything I had known.”

To his credit, Birkerts is properly cynical, after all these years, about his self-mythologizing and his lack of commitment to the rebellion of his times. “My sixties--my counterculture years--were about striking poses, not striking,” he writes. “I was full to the brim with rage, but it was confused rage. I said it was against the system, against the authority structure, but much more it was against my father, the source, I thought, of my childhood estrangement from everything I wanted.”

Throughout, however, there were books, a constant safe haven for his inner and outer turmoil and his lack of direction. Books (fiction and poetry, mostly) became Birkerts’ guardian, there to watch over him during depressive intervals and to provide him with a livelihood, time and again in his 20s, through a succession of bookstore jobs in Ann Arbor and Boston.

In “My Sky Blue Trades,” we catch a glimpse of a writer attempting to create a narrative of his life, and that Birkerts succeeds without resorting to the tawdry or spectacular is a measure of his skill.