The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County

"As I said, I’m an academic working on contemporary fiction. So, when I write about wellness, I’m not writing a self-help book. I also come from a cultural-historical perspective; I write about film, music, and also other forms of popular culture. With my project, Well Beings , I’ve been trying to diagnose and question one of the key ‘myths’ of the 1970s, the idea that the decade lost all of the radicalism of the 1960s and disappeared into self-regard. I argue that wellness absorbed this radicalism, and that there was a real political potency to the practice. That said, the idea of the 1970s as a decade of compromise, political exhaustion and selfishness is hard to avoid. There are three texts from the period that helped to establish this: The Culture of Narcissism (1976) by Christopher Lasch, which is a sociological take; Tom Wolfe’s essay ‘ The Me Decade ,’ which is classic piece of New Journalism, and then there’s the fictional take, Cyra McFadden’s novel, The Serial (1977), subtitled: ‘a year in the life of Marin County.’ Marin County is an affluent area outside of San Francisco that was famous in the 1970s for being an alternative health hotspot. In The Serial , McFadden uses Marin as the backdrop for a long, extended satire of the Human Potential Movement. She lived there at the time and what she saw around her was little more than a vapid culture of selfishness and self-regard. The Serial got a lot of attention from the national press and was later adapted into a film. The novel is full of invented names and but also a lot of actual locations. Travis’ Wellness Resource Center even makes an appearance at one point. Thanks to this specificity, McFadden received a lot of criticism—often very vociferous—from those who felt personally mocked by the novel. McFadden’s response was that she was not questioning those who want to improve their lives or enhance their sense of wellbeing. Rather, she was trying to critique what she calls the “smell of sanctimony” that went with it. It was this attitude and not specific people, that McFadden had in her sights. But the brilliance of The Serial as a piece of writing lies in the way that McFadden nails the art of satirical superficiality a good decade before Bret Easton Ellis tried something similar in American Psycho (1991). This style allows The Serial to be both incisive and funny. There are plenty of scenes, for example, that play out on the passive aggressive dinner party circuit. We’re shown groups of people who talk at length but fail to listen to each other and who are able to talk about cookbooks and primal screaming in exactly the same breath, as if there’s no difference between them. The main plot follows a young-ish, middle-class couple who move to the area and then split up before going through various individual crises and exploring alternative modes of health in response. It’s very well done and very well written. Razor sharp. A collection of vignettes, all superbly well observed. The Serial isn’t that well known today but —speaking as a critic— I think it really should be right up there alongside Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978)."