By Steve Provizer

Boomer Madness: Scenes from an American Life by Robert Dattoli. Xlibris US, 456 pages, softcover, $45.95.

Robert Dattoli’s Boomer Madness recounts a picaresque journey through sex, drugs, work, protest, and the cultural upheavals of postwar America—but its reflections on the generation often prove less compelling than its adventures.

We usually pick up biographies because we’re curious about someone who, for better or worse, made an impact on the world: FDR, Hitler. Or we may dip into the biography of someone who was a player in a “scene”—Watergate, Warhol’s Factory, or the death of Bin Ladin. Few people will recognize the name Robert Dattoli, author of Boomer Madness. He was a part of many scenes, but he was not a key player in any. Dattoli stakes his claim on the basis of his membership in the Baby Boomer generation—technically, Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Dattoli was born in 1943, so we have to stretch a point to get him into that category. Yet there’s no question that Dattoli passed through a number of seminal Boomer guideposts.

Dattoli’s largely dysfunctional family was part of the White Flight to the suburbs; he sniffed glue, discovered the blues and Beat poetry, drove across the country to Haight-Ashbury, was a winning contestant on the early days of Jeopardy with Art Fleming, marched on Washington, went on a brown-rice diet, and attended the first Earth Day. He witnessed the demise of the Catskills and psychedelia (viz., the Electric Circus), had a lot of pre-AIDS sex, and took a lot of drugs—800 acid trips, by his account. Despite all this frenetic activity, I see-sawed between immersion and disinterest in the book.

His job as a CDC syphilis epidemiology field worker in Brooklyn was fascinating, while his descriptions of programming COBOL for Mobil Oil were not. Lengthy descriptions of lurid New York City sex shows eventually pall, but I was moved by descriptions of singer Jackie Wilson at the end of his career, playing in an Atlantic City dive. Dattoli contrasts his gig with that of the one-hit band the Argyles, performing down the street in the “big boardwalk venue.”

Being vetted by Dallas businessmen on the basis of his drinking capacity made my eyes glaze over. But not so a passage describing scenes in New York City life like this one:

Especially at night, people walked slowly past the Women’s House of Detention in order to take in some of the drama unfolding in the air around them. As I walked by the formidable-looking building that morning, the air was filled with protestations of lesbian love shouted down from cell windows and affirmations shouted up from the sidewalk below.

Turgid listings of what Dattoli did during the course of his 800 acid trips contrast with the author’s compelling explanation of how he got out of the Marine Corps Reserves:

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara decided to reorganize the country’s military to marshal his finances for a full 500,000-soldier invasion of Vietnam…Part of this scheme was to reduce the reserve forces.

The ethically and legally dubious shenanigans of Perot Systems to win a contract, witnessed by Dattoli when he worked at McGraw Hill, were a lot more interesting than his shabby, sexist descriptions of the attributes of the various women he bedded and wedded.

The author does not supply much introspection about the political aspects of “Boomerism.” He makes much of “Boomer Luck,” which resulted from the economic opportunities created by the post-war economic boom. He had none of the anti-corporate inclinations of many Boomers; he worked as a computer guy for the likes of Mobil Oil, McGraw-Hill, and United Fruit Company. This complicity makes his only critique of corporate America startling:

The impacts of the unsustainable self-indulgence of the Boomers’ thoughtless conduct then rippled down to the following generations, leaving them to face the dire climate consequences that are already baked into our future climate.

So, bottom line, is Dattoli’s association with the Boomer experience enough to justify a 456-page book?

I’ll frame my response around a comparison Dattoli himself draws between Joseph Campbell’s familiar injunction to “follow your bliss” and Samuel Beckett’s vision of a life defined by bleak persistence. Dattoli suspects that Beckett occasionally “transcends his apparent despair” in lines such as “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” That paradox captures my response to this book. As a Boomer who passed through some of the same generational rites of passage, I recognized much of what Dattoli describes, even as I found his analyses of those experiences—and of the broader culture—wanting. Hence: “I can’t go on.” Yet the intensity of his picaresque adventures, and the insights he draws from them, compelled me to add: “I’ll go on.”

Steve Provizer writes on a range of subjects, most often the arts. He is a musician and blogs about jazz here.