Joyce Maynard in Retreat

JOYCE MAYNARD and I were born within four weeks of each other in the winter of 1953, which makes me, chronologically at least, a member of the disenchanted, precocious, Pepsigone-flat generation she writes about and passes herself off as representing. It is true that the two of us had a lot in common. I, too, counted down Friendship-7, agonized with Beaver Cleaver and compared SAT scores. Both of us recall much of our past as photos from Life and the cover of Newsweek. Not surprisingly, many of her recollections -- if not her conclusions -- from growing up in Durham, New Hampshire, are similar to mine, from growing up in suburban Philadelphia.

The familiarity of Looking Back is based on more than memories of a mythical national experience. The core of the book has appeared before elsewhere, in bits and pieces now artificially bridged.

The first of her New York Times pieces, "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life," brought her national prominence, a rash of wedding proposals, and an extended pilgrimage to J.D. Salinger's Connecticut chicken coop. The article -- which extended is the essence of her book -- also established Maynard as a not-so-reluctant spokeswoman for what she refers to as "my generation."

Being the spokeswoman for a generation is no mean feat. Maynard is careful to point out on the last page of her book that she cannot speak for the blacks, the dropouts or the war orphans. But for the rest of us, the media children for whom "the Beatles and the Kennedys were as close as relatives, some of the memories are national, even universal."

Maynard remembers a lot, and turning inward for her universal diagnosis, what she remembers best is the urgent futility of the prematurely aging sixties. "If there's a main theme, a single result of our sixties experience, I think it's the idea of growing up old, feeling not disillusionment so much as weariness."

IN MANY WAYS, the sixties did demand precocious maturity. Along with the dilemmas of Dick Van Dyke, television gave us a living-room war, assassinations and demonstrations. There was a flood of information without experience, eulogies that briefly inspired, shocks that permanently numbed. A lot of idealism was distilled down to cynicism, and a lot of hope was replaced by despair.

Many of Maynard's observations on those times, while pleasantly nostalgic, are obvious and trite. "College is not right for everyone," she points out. "The Beatles gave us something more than music." "Why do looks matter so much?" she wants to know. Others, though, are aphoristic and revealing. Somehow, she tells us, she could never imagine Jackie Kennedy going to the bathroom. Abandoning "relevance" to set up a prom, "we knew just enough to feel guilty, like trick-or-treaters nervously passing a ghost with a UNICEF box in his hand."

Negotiating with those persistent guilt feelings is what aged us so tragically early, Maynard concludes. Commitments only brought disappointments. We're tired, she despairs, jaded by reports of atrocities, bored by information, haunted by our failures.

But worse than the despair of the sixties is the indifference and self-deception with which Maynard approaches the seventies. "I had visions of good works," she writes. "Now my goal is simpler. I want to be happy. And I want comfort... I'll vote and I'll give to charity, but I won't give myself. I have a sudden desire to buy land... a kind of fall-out shelter, I guess. As some people prepare for their old age, so I prepare for my twenties. A little house, a comfortable chair, peace and quiet -- retirement sounds tempting."

The media brought the war into our homes and gave us worldliness not from actually seeing the world but from watching it on television. But we could always turn the TV off or put aside a magazine, and essentially ignore both the war and the world. Safe within the TV-bred confidence that everything will turn out all right by the end of the half-hour, Maynard handles the information flood that shows no signs of ebbing by retreating to the blind trust of earlier times, by pleading ignorance, by turning inward.

MORE THAN ANY crisis, the broad embracing of Joyce Maynard and her weariness worries me. Her lesson, according to one reviewer, is that "if you buy what the media are selling, you get shoddy, short-lived goods, that the task of the times may be to close one's mind to the flow of easy symbols and pre-packaged interpretations." Maynard is being peddled by the media as our sage, and her introspection, though appealing, is directionless, as she readily admits. Now that Maynard has accumulated a following of the wornout, there doesn't seem to be anyplace to lead it. Her next book will be about doll houses, which along with TV was her childhood passion. I guess I'm a little too old for that.