Later, Roland, an on-and-off journalist and poet, pitches a leftist publication an essay arguing that a Margaret Thatcher premiership would advance the feminist cause, which it rejects. He becomes disillusioned with the Labor Party’s commitment to socialism and turns in his membership card. There he befriends a couple, one of whom is arrested for publishing an article in an unsanctioned magazine and the other for not reporting him.

Roland then begins what he calls his “lost decade,” playing in a jazz band, working odd jobs, entering numerous short-term relationships with women, and traveling around the world, including to East Germany. This spell is only broken by a proposal of marriage, which he quickly rejects. By 16, Roland is entirely under her spell, having consented to Miriam’s request that he drop out of school and spend his days sitting in her house in his pajamas, with his clothes and books locked inside her shed. The relationship begins when she propositions him at age 11 and is consummated at age 14 when he shows up at her doorstep during the Cuban missile crisis, determined not to die a virgin.

Here, his childhood is cut short by a tumultuous sexual and romantic relationship with his piano teacher, Miriam, who attempts to conceal her obsession with Roland with sadistic cruelty. In 1959, after the natives become restless and declare independence, Roland is sent away to a rural British boarding school. He is born soon after World War II, the son of a bootstrapping British colonel who works administrating the Allied occupation of Libya. Roland stands in as a synecdochic boomer well.

Lessons ian