Dinty Moore’s Between Panic & Desire certainly fits within the University of Nebraska Press’s American Lives series. Like series volumes that have come before (John Skoyles’ Secret Frequencies, Eli Hastings’ Falling Rooom), Between Panic & Desire is a coming of age story that captures a very specific moment in history. However, unlike more traditional memoirists, Moore avoids a strictly linear narrative. Instead, he appropriates other genres—multiple choice tests, encyclopedia entries, reports about himself written in the third person—for a more creative storytelling.
Moore’s book—the title of which plays on being literally between two very real towns in his native Pennsylvania (Panic and Desire), and figuratively between two emotional states—does a wonderful job of capturing the panic and paranoia that surrounded and defined his generation. He admits this as a goal of the book in his first chapter:
[M]aybe this isn’t a memoir. Perhaps it is a generational autobiography—a chronicle of those events most responsible for twisting our collective psyche over the past forty or so years, especially for those of us who remember where we were on the day Kennedy died. The first one.
JFK, Vietnam, Civil Rights, Watergate, the Cold War: these events shaped the lives of Baby Boomers so profoundly that a little panic is to be expected. In the first two section of his memoir, Moore explores these topics to dizzying affect. Panic truly morphs into paranoia in “Number Nine,” a strung out chronicling of events in the author’s life, events on the national stage, and facts containing the number nine itself. Moore links these events, repeating the number itself in a hypnotic way that may remind some readers of a Kubrick film.
The book arrives, inevitably, at desire. While Moore doesn’t quite translate desire in the same tangible way he translated paranoia, he does continue to usurp other forms in interesting and useful ways. For instance, in “What You Want, What You Get, What You Need: A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem,” Moore writes his own coroner’s report. For this, Moore not only appropriates Hugh Brannum, a very real figure from recent television history (Mr. Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo), but also the format, section titles, and some of the language of police reportage, weaving all of this into a very self-aware, first person, self-psycho-analysis.
In between the pop quizzes and the riffs on other’s works (for instance, George Orwell in the aptly titled chapter “1984”), readers crave something more substantial, a way to connect to the subject. “Son of Richard M. Nixon” and “Three Milestones” offer glimpses of this, but the gem of the book might be “Double Vision.” This chapter about the author’s diplopia (double vision) lets readers sink into a more familiar personal essay format. Here, Moore mixes wry, almost self-deprecating humor and carefully wrought descriptions of himself as a young man to infuse the piece with touching humanity. Consequently, “Double Vision” offers the moat trustworthy snapshot of the author.
In these moments, Moore’s memoir presents something more than just another generation-specific series volume. Still, the generational appeal does limit its resonance. It won’t perhaps be, as the inside cover of the book jacket claims, “hilarious” to a younger audience. Indeed, Moore might have been describing his audience in that first chapter: “those . . . who remember where [they] were on the day Kennedy died.” But Between Panic & Desire offers small insights and well-wrought descriptions, putting the panic of the 1960s and 70s into a context that perhaps other memoirs have striven to, but ultimately fallen short. In that, Moore triumphs.