`Seagull's' Son Finally Has His Say

Dying to work in a bookstore? It's a common daydream among book lovers: to spend gentle, stress-free days surrounded by works of literature, chatting with customers who share your passion for Atwood, Updike or Oates.

The reality is much different, as I discovered in 1972, working at a trendy bookstore in Carmel, Calif. We kept the sound system humming with Beethoven quartets and Andean flute music, and at a time when bookstore-cafes were a novelty, our customers could have a glass of chablis and an avocado sandwich while thumbing through their purchases.

But I was soon forced to forget Great Literature. On my day in the stockroom, I would unbox paperbacks by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jacqueline Susann, or the endless stream of "I'm OK, You're OK." At the front desk, I had to forgot Atwood & Co., too. It was all I could do to act civil when yet another jerk asked for "Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution," the latest last-diet-you'll-ever-need.

Unavoidably, one becomes a snob working in a bookstore, especially when folks aren't reading what you think they ought to be reading. I realized I could just as easily be working at Thom McAn in the mall: I was merely hawking a product that consisted of printed pages between covers.

No book bothered me more that year than "Jonathan Livingston Seagull." We sold stacks and stacks of the 93-page fable that Gore Vidal called "a greeting card bound like a book." Richard Bach's paean to individualism and the quest for perfection gained popularity slowly, but by July 1972, it was No. 1 on The New York Times' bestseller list, a spot it occupied for 38 weeks.

My bookstore colleagues and I disdained "Jonathan," even as it flew out the door. We hadn't actually read it, of course, being otherwise occupied since "The Greening of America" had just come out in paperback.

Well, I've finally read "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," and while I think Vidal was on target years ago, now I can agree with him with a clear conscience. This was occasioned by reading a new book by a Seattle writer, Jonathan Bach, who is Richard's son and the namesake of the indefatigable bird in his father's bestseller.

"Above the Clouds: A Reunion of Father and Son" (Morrow, $20) is the younger Bach's memoir of coming to terms with a father who became "a world-famous author" but who, on the brink of his greatest success, abandoned his wife and six children.

Jonathan was only 2, the next-to-youngest of the brood, when his father walked out in 1970. He grew up not knowing the man, who eventually remarried and settled in the San Juan Islands - a continent away from the family's home in Vermont. But Jonathan grew up around airplanes, his pilot-father's first love, because the elder Bach had taught Jonathan's mother to fly, a skill she parlayed into various jobs at small airports in New England.

"Above the Clouds" is Jonathan's earnest account of reconnecting with his father, of trying to understand him and finally coming to like him. Unlike other coming-of-age memoirs (Tobias Wolff's memorable "This Boy's Life" comes to mind), "Above the Clouds" is clearly the work of a young writer, one in his early 20s who has not yet found his voice and whose experience has been limited to family and college. Bach's prose has a "Gee whiz!" ring to it, yet the story he tells rarely resonates beyond his immediate concerns.

While I'm glad he has reached an accord with his father, I can't say that I would have, based on the Richard Bach who emerges here, surely unintentionally: a smoothly manipulative man who has concocted a self-serving "philosophy" of personal freedom, a sort of New-Age voodoo laced with reincarnation, parallel universes and pseudomysticism. You aren't surprised when he remarks near the end, ". . .there's nothing wrong with (escaping). There's no problem so big that you can't run away from it."