[Paul Zindel's] problem as a writer is what to do when you are writing about [the non-conforming young in America] as an outsider to their current revolutionary values and life-style. He solves it [in I Never Loved Your Mind] in an immensely clever way which leaves a mild trace of anxiety. Dewey Daniels … has career problems. For want of anything else, he gets a job as a hospital assistant on leaving high school. Telling a first person narrative, Mr. Zindel wins our identification with the humorous, heartless, uninvolved Dewey, who tells himself "What the hell!" and finds the hospital one pretty funny sick joke; but is, deep down somewhere, a straight, very nice guy. Dewey also finds Yvette, a glamorous, heavy-breasted girl colleague … who eats broccoli sandwiches and steals hospital equipment for the counter-culture commune she lives in with a group called the "Electric Lovin' Stallions". Gradually, through a bizarre tale told with great pace and fantastic humour (Mr. Zindel's readers would seem about to get to Kurt Vonnegut), Yvette demonstrates the vacuity of her life and beliefs: the message is, firmly and unobtrusively, that the world is an awful, corrupt place but Yvette's free-loving, macrobiotic values are no answer. Better be Dewey, chastened and solidified by his experience of both hospital and of Yvette's bed, who decides at the end to turn purposeful, and train to be a doctor. Mr. Zindel understands his young people, but also knows what he would like them to be. He might be right, but his book is a slightly too clever plea for conformity which will leave his most alert readers more than a little suspicious.
"Looking for a Life-Style," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1971; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 3605, April 2, 1971, p. 385.∗
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