The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County (often referred to as justThe Serial) is asatirical novel aboutMarin County, California, written byCyra McFadden.[1] Beginning in 1976, the book's chapters had beenserialized in the Marin Countyalternative weekly newspaperPacific Sun, as well as theSan Francisco Chronicle. It was first published in book form in 1977.
The book deals with life in mid-1970s Marin County, a suburban and affluent county just north ofSan Francisco.
The book was popular at the time of its initial publication. It has since been out of print for several years in the United States. It was reprinted in the United Kingdom byPrion Humour Classics in 2000 and as an apostrophebooks.com e-book in 2013.[2]
A film version of the book, calledSerial, was released in 1980 and starredMartin Mull andTuesday Weld. It was received with limited critical praise.
The Serial is divided into 52 short chapters. It chronicles the lives of a group of residents of Marin County, mostly in their mid-to-late 30s and early 40s. The plot revolves around Harvey and Kate Holroyd, a couple in the midst of the mid-1970s Marin County lifestyle who are undergoing marital problems, with many other characters introduced in the book.
The period of the storyline covers a time between the heyday of the1960s counterculture and the culture loosely described as "Yuppie". There are elements ofsoap opera in the book, although the tone is comedic (specifically, satirical) rather than tragic. The novel describes its characters' lifestyles, including their interest in variousNew Age beliefs andhuman potential movement groups (includingest,transcendental meditation, consciousness-raising, andrebirthing); their unconventional and arguably lax child-rearing techniques; and their embrace of a number of then-current fads, such asfern bars,jogging, and organic food.Wife swapping andopen marriage are common as frequentdivorces. Many things associated with the human potential movement are mentioned and satirized, including est, the Fischer-Hoffman Process, andJonathan Livingston Seagull;radical feminism andSierra Club membership are seemingly ubiquitous; and kids are sent to free-formsummer camps offeringsurvival training and "spontaneous rap sessions". The book satirizes many of the elements of a particular mid-to-late 1970s subculture, also described to some degree by authorTom Wolfe in his 1976 non-fiction essay "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening", particularly as manifested in the lives of people then between the ages of about 30 and 45 in affluent parts ofCalifornia.
Many of the characters inThe Serial also speak a particular jargon or lexicon, saying words and phrases like "flash on" (aphrasal verb meaning "to have a sudden insight about", as in "I really flashed on that"), "Really" (to signify assent), and others.
The Serial contains a great number of specific references to actual locations (restaurants, stores, streets) in 1970s Marin County. In the originalPacific Sun weekly chapters, black-and-white illustrations by Tom Cervenak accompany the text. These illustrations were included in the original edition of the book and in the first paperback edition of the book.
The Serial is a comedy about moderns struggling to keep their chins above the rising sea of their status anxieties. It is aBaedeker guide to a desolate region, the monochromatic inner landscape of persons whose life is consumption, of goods and salvations, and whose moral makeup is the curious modern combination of hedonism and earnestness.[3][4]
— George Will, reviewing the novel, in 1977