To the Editor:

Daphne Merkin’s otherwise perceptive review of Cyra McFadden’s The Serial [Books in Review, October 1977] contains a major factual error. The Serial’s characters are residents of Northern—not Southern—California; their “high-energy” lives are vintage Marin County—a cosmic zone due north of San Francisco. . . .

This is not to suggest that Southern California life is a model of restraint. Readers of Nathanael West and Joan Didion are familiar with the sun-drenched madness peculiar to Los Angeles. But the Bay Area scene that The Serial probes has a special sensibility. It is a land of hot tubs, defining one’s space, self-awareness, holistic medicine, as compared with the Southland’s Jacuzzis, being laid back, self-fulfillment, est. But all this is to cavil with Miss Merkin’s main point. Life in Mill Valley—and, for that matter, the Hollywood Hills—assumes not only a surfeit of money but an uneasiness with it that seeks assurance in Cuisinarts and Bierkenstocks. More important is the need to be hip, to have the appropriately advanced views; to be liberated from bourgeois self-denial and self-discipline. None of this would be too disturbing if it were accompanied by an awareness of the self-indulgence and class privilege that underlie the advanced styles of life found in The Serial. Instead, we find a heavy smog of social elitism and political quietism that threatens to block the view of Mount Tamalpais.

Kevin V. Mulcahy
Claremont, California

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To the Editor:

Daphne Merkin suggests that political content is absent from The Serial because Cyra McFadden “has dulled her bite” and has “half a mind to protect the very society she has undertaken to expose.” The logic of this conclusion escapes me; but, in any event, the assertion that the trendy political notions of Mrs. McFadden’s characters are conspicuous by their absence is simply wrong. A brief review of the book reveals references to: the Sierra Club, Barbara Boxer’s campaign, Abzug and Steinem, Wasp imperialism, and Jerry Brown. These references are at the very least derisive. Mrs. McFadden’s intention was not to chew more than she bit off, and nothing would have been gained from rounding out the lives of her characters—who, after all, are cartoons—by giving disproportionate attention to their politics. . . .

Dennis F. Zickerman
Berkeley, California

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Daphne Merkin writes:

My apologies to Kevin V. Mulcahy and his fellow Californians for placing Marin County at the wrong end of the state. The error had more to do with a deficient grasp on my part of the rudiments of geography than with any native Eastern chauvinism.

I do not see what Dennis F. Zickerman finds mysterious about my logic. It seemed to me that Cyra McFadden was strikingly less relentless in her satiric treatment of the politics of her characters than she was in dealing with almost everything else connected with what Mr. Mulcahy calls their “advanced styles of life.” I was not suggesting that Mrs. McFadden flesh out intentionally stick-like figures by giving “disproportionate attention to their politics”; I was merely commenting on her lack of attention to this aspect of their lives.