The Adventures of
Dorothy & Marian
novel by Elizabeth Van Vogt

by  Richard Schiff

Once upon a time there was a young girl named Elizabeth Holmes. Her older brother was a non conformist and had a lot of non conformist friends at a time when that was not the way of the masses. In fact it came to be know as the Beat Generation and that little girl Elizabeth was dragged around the Village and New York by that big brother. He happened to be John Clellon Holmes, author of "This is the Beat Generation" in 1958.

This is a double story; one of the mother Dorothy and the other the daughter Marian, each trying to do their lives in the best and really only ways they can and the parallels and the foibles and the fears the longings and the doubts are all there.

The Adventures of Dorothy & Marian is first novel by Elizabeth Von Vogt offers readers an intriguing two-for-one coming of age story.....Von Vogt has given us a heartfelt book keenly relevant to women asking new questions about their lives. Moreover, she does so with flashes of fine writing as in this brief description of a sightseeing stroll in Italy: "I had walked out to the tombs from the central piazza through a fine, sticky drizzle into the countryside gone slack by the town. The sky had turned sour, and away off to my left the sea lay wide like an iron rug."She and her husband live in Maine. The salt air serves her talent well.

The abiding love object of the novel and that whatever happened there would be richer, stranger, more mysterious than anything
even in Paris or Rome... The early days in New York seemed to run through the whole novel...serving as a way of apprehending life without pretense or false moralism, but with a sense of adventure and openness (the Kerouac influence, I guess), but it was really the spirit of the age that Kerouac caught. He did not invent it, neither did Carolyn or Neal Cassady. They will tell you that. But there was a sense of self that arose in the 50's that led to the exuberant celebrations of self in the 60's and beyond.

This is a great read. I heartily recommend especially for Newyorkerphiles!

A great season read.