The Sweetest Dream continues Lessing’s longstanding preoccupation with the intimate connection, most insistently proclaimed in our times by radical feminists, between the personal and the political. The book may also be seen as a further and most explicit stage in Lessing’s journey of distancing herself from her old leftist convictions and from all radical-utopian beliefs. What she seeks to convey here has certainly been proposed before, by philosophers, political scientists, and clear-headed intellectuals: that there is no political or social solution for personal problems, especially for the most difficult ones. Likewise, sweeping schemes of social engineering founder on their own unintended consequences and the imponderables of human nature. The determined mixing of the personal and the political, more often than not, yields unpleasant results.

This is a novel mainly about England in the 1960s, but it spans half a century from World War II until the late 1990s. In a short preface, Lessing expresses the hope that she “managed to recapture the spirit of the Sixties” (she does, most successfully) and conveys justifiable irritation with the (British) Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (“there has never been a more hysterical, noisy and irrational campaign”), which embodied many of the questionable beliefs and attitudes of the period.

Unlike most books focusing on the 1960s and written on either side of the Atlantic, and especially on ours, The Sweetest Dream is not infused with nostalgia for that supposedly golden era of youthful idealism and personal liberation. Quite to the contrary, Lessing embarks on a highly critical, although not totally unsympathetic, examination of the period and the types of people who seemed to set and reflect its tone most characteristically. I can only think of Saul Bellow (and especially his Mr. Sammler’s Planet) as offering a comparably profound critical reflection of that era’s problematic aspirations and the human beings emblematic of them, who firmly believed that all good things are compatible, including no-holds-barred “self-realization,” warm communal relationships, and the revolutionary transformation of all social institutions and practices. This was “the sweetest dream.”

It was a period when large numbers of people were seized by the conviction that what mattered most were good and pure intentions, which by themselves vindicated the actions they inspired. Even more remarkably, these people believed that human love, kindness, and a sense of solidarity could be extended and expanded effortlessly and without discrimination.

In this book these impulses find expression in, among other things, the commendable but somewhat muddled generosity of the major character, Frances (a “neurotic nurturer” as “the kids” see her); she takes into her spacious home various “strays” who belong to “a tribe of youngsters ‘disturbed’ for one reason or another”—confusedly rebellious middle-class youth (including the offspring of her former spouse). These young people habitually refer to their parents as “shits.” Frances the nurturer is a kind and largely apolitical woman who nonetheless absorbed through much of her life the beliefs and impulses prevalent in the subcultures of the 1960s. She is a victim both of these beliefs and of her own decency.

It is her former husband, “comrade Johnny,” who is the prime exhibit of the foolishness, irresponsibility, and hypocrisy of which a thoroughly politicized human being is capable. The son of wealthy parents, he was educated at Eton, but as a young man became involved with the British Communist party; he remains through much of his life a full-time functionary. Staunchly pro-Soviet until almost the very end of “the Soviet experiment,” later in life Johnny switches to a more broadly based leftist “third-worldism,” admiring Castro and assorted African dictators. What does not change is his deep alienation from his own country and his despising of capitalism; if indeed it is capitalism that is the deepest animating impulse behind Johnny’s relentless hostility toward his own society and the non-socialist Western world.

Johnny exemplifies what happens when the political realm invades and absorbs the personal: the withering of the personal. He is never at a loss to spout soothing (or rousing) agit-prop rhetoric, but is singularly “challenged” in the department of ordinary human concerns and feelings. He is serenely unconcerned with the welfare of his children from his failed marriages; he supports them neither financially nor emotionally. He is a windbag and inveterate freeloader, a parasite with a clear conscience getting free meals from his former first wife, whom he holds in great contempt on account of her low level of political consciousness. (“My wife . . . does not understand that the Struggle must come before family obligations.”) Why worry about such mundane matters when you are dedicating your life to the liberation of the masses and the future of humanity? Life holds no mysteries for him, and he has a ready answer and the remedy for every question and problem. In this, he reminds me of Homais, the pharmacist in Madame Bovary, another irresponsible, cheerfully impersonal windbag, beholden to soothing platitudes extracted from the beliefs of the French Enlightenment.

American readers may be surprised by the many similarities between the ethos and representatives of the 1960s in England and in this country. For example, in the English private school of the novel, “pupils came and went, with little regard for time-tables or exams. When teachers suggested a more disciplined approach, they might be reminded of the principles that had established the school, self-development being the main one.” Similarly familiar is the physical appearance of the people populating these pages who wear the “current uniforms of non-conformity,” and are described as “Che Guevara clones.” In England too, in these circles, the epithet “fascism” was thrown around with abandon: “they all used the word fascist as easily as they said fuck, or shit, not necessarily meaning much more than this was somebody they disapproved of.” The mentally ill, these English youngsters believed, “are just like us.” The tribal massacres in Africa were dismissed as products of a “different culture,” another expression of cultural diversity that should not prompt “judgemental” attitudes. A group of true believers (in the novel) could listen to the revelations of a former inmate of the Gulag “as if the tale did not concern them.” They are people (like the American believers in the innocence of the Rosenbergs) “who cannot change once their minds are made up.”

These similarities are all the more surprising since the two countries and societies in question are vastly different; Britain was neither involved in the Vietnam war, nor did she have to face the historic burden of slavery—two factors frequently invoked to explain the social-political movements of the 1960s in the United States and the deep alienation their participants displayed. What the alienated had in common in both societies—as this novel suggests—was a combination of privileged background, a sense of political and economic security and entitlement (compatible with all sorts of neurotic needs and symptoms), and a profound belief that the prevailing social-political institutions and arrangements were self-evidently and utterly rotten and worthless. This complex of attitudes helps to explain, for example, why most of the privileged youngsters in the book consider shoplifting both an entertaining and lucrative hobby and a desirable form of political struggle against “the system,” against capitalism. (“When he [one of the characters] arrived at the LSE he was delighted that to steal clothes, books, anything one fancied, as a means of undermining the capitalist system was taken for granted. To actually pay for something, well, how politically naive can one get?”)

Lessing does not have a clear answer as to the root of this malaise, of “this rage . . . too deep in some part of the collective unconscious to reason with.” The closest she comes to pointing to a source is the British version of the generational conflict and incomplete or malfunctioning families. There are numerous glimpses of parents’ self-centeredness and irresponsibility, often associated with the period’s grand notions of self-realization. Such parental neglect helps to explain the mentality and rootlessness of this small sample of the English “youth culture.”

It is not hard to understand how children who grow up without a father or with two indifferent, uninvolved parents become susceptible to a deep sense of grievance, which may or may not take a political form, depending on the prevailing social conditions. The sons of Johnny and Frances are obvious examples, although, given their grotesquely irresponsible and largely absent father, they become scornful of his politics. Arguably they belong to the offspring of “a generation of Believers, now discredited, [who] had given birth to children who disowned their parents’ beliefs, but admired their dedication. . . . What faith! What passion! What idealism!” Here again is a close parallel with the so-called “red diaper babies” in this country, who became prominent 1960s activists, and subsequently academics, writing reverent studies of the American communist movement without fully identifying with its failed policies.

Another virtually separate part of the novel takes place in an African country named Zimlia, which closely resembles present-day Zimbabwe and is seen through the eyes of one of the novel’s characters, a young, idealistic doctor who takes a job there to help the poor. Her experiences of the pervasive corruption, brutality, and economic stagnation—rarely encountered in Western works of fiction (or non-fiction) about Africa—is further illustration of the colossal and disheartening gap separating theory from practice, good intentions from good results, and of a spectacular failure of decolonialization. The new, indigenous elites are greedy, cynical, and ruthless, and no more concerned with the welfare of the masses than their predecessors were. Another sweet dream shattered.

The greatest strength of this powerful novel is its compelling focus on the timeless tension between idealistic social-political aspiration and the dark side of human nature. Fallible and flawed human beings, torn between numerous conflicting values and desires, are bound to fail in creating a social order in which there is no chasm between the private and the public, the personal and the political, good intentions and good results. As Lessing shows, “the sweetest dream” of such harmony and fulfillment will likely continue to haunt and elude us.