'The Berkeley Pit' Embodies Spirit of 1960s

The Berkeley Pit is a 30 billion gallon soup of corrosive acids and toxic mine runoff. By the end of "The Berkeley Pit," the latest effort by veteran author and Berkeley resident Dorothy Bryant, the pit for which the book is named has been discovered to harbor a virulent new bacteria. A bacterial duke-out ensues: good germs eat bad germs, rendering the water harmless, even drinkable. It's a metaphor for hope, see?

On the surface, "The Berkeley Pit" tracks the travails of Harry Lynch, a Butte native who arrives in 60s-era Berkeley just in time to watch the powder keg go boom. More largely, the book is a treatise on the city's tumultuous history and an occasionally clumsy meditation on the perils of nostalgia gone to rot.

Through the eyes of narrator Ruth Carson, a professor at the college where Harry enrolls, we see things unbolt. The Free Speech Movement, having occurred just years earlier, marks the turmoil to come. The Black Panther Party is beginning to stage incendiary attacks on the establishment. A combustible student

population is poised to riot. Dread-locked youth squat on Telegraph Avenue, smoking pot and doing tabs of LSD. In this aspect, "The Berkeley Pit" is successful: It vividly imagines the era's cultural pitch and hubbub, populating it with distinctive characters and situating the story's intimate dramas in singular, immediately recognizable Berkeley locales.

In fact, the novel's clear-eyed chronicling of various crisis points is one of its strongest suits. It depicts the sociopolitical currents that power the protests and draw in armed policemen, tanks and the National Guard. For the most part, Bryant has a subtle handle on her characters' psyches. Historical figures like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver make spirited appearances, contributing to a sense of the city's community and cultural make-up.

Most touching is the brief but unblinking rendition of a brutal family backstory. Nonnarina, Harry's stoic great-grandmother, fights to save her home from contractors, raises a family with little money and zero help from her deadbeat husband and bears back-breaking hardship for decades without complaint. For a character that doesn't appear except in fictive accounts penned by her own great-grandson, Nonnarina is one of the book's most sympathetic and forceful figures.

For all its strengths, the book is equally saddled with flaws. Overly obvious pit symbolism frustrates attempts at subtlety, while overcooked meta-literary analyses can get heavy-handed at best and infuriating at worst. And as lengthy as the novel is, there are the expected episodes of breathtaking tedium, where the narrator drones on about the mild Machiavellian intrigues of aging radicals. A bizarre gossip column subplot and feeble side-swipe attempts at probing the plight of gay men during the era make for an ungainly ending sequence.

Ultimately, the book degenerates into a masochistic recounting of Harry Lynch's train-wreck life. His wife leaves him. His kid hates him. Berkeley is not the tender cradle of idealism he remembers but--oh, sniff!-a modern day gutter for all the riff-raff, stoner trash and lip-ring punks flooding in from surrounding counties. Restrained as the prose is, the story oversteps into overwrought pathos, a pity party to which the reader is cordially invited.

The foreword's author trills, starry-eyed, that reading the book-indeed, discovering the revelatory work of Dorothy Bryant-has changed his life forever. In the end, though, the book is neither very good or very bad, instead idling in purgatory between two opposite poles. In fact, the most commendable and damning thing you can say about it is that it's competent. Still, with its insurgent histories, and the intra-cultural dialogue it stages between Berkeley the town and Berkeley the toxic pit, the book's a bracing tribute to a city where hemp bracelets can be bought off girls named Starbright and protesters live in the trees to prevent them from being cut down.