PERIPHERAL VISIONS: MEMOIRS OF A WASHINGTON CHILDHOOD, by Farnham Blair; Puckerbrush Press, Orono, Maine, 2004; 132 pages, paperback, $15.95.

This is one of the strangest, and truest, books written in Maine in recent memory.

Farnham Blair’s memoir “Peripheral Visions” gives 37 snapshot recollections of his boyhood. Each chapter is titled with a person’s name and a year, spanning 1944 to 1961, with an epilogue of 1984 when the author had reached the age of about 40. Anecdotes and observations of the author’s mother and father, aunts, uncles, boyhood pals and teachers, and friends of the family, depict a boy’s life in well-to-do Washington, D.C., with time-warp visits to a summer house on Little Cranberry Island.

We hear of young Farnham, or “Mike,” being taught by his well-connected father to shoot, of his mother teaching him to play bridge, and of events associated with their divorce. His grandmother is a socially impeccable, razor-sharp wit and a shrewd protector. There’s a heartwarming recollection of a fifth-grade teacher who taught his boys to play the stock market and surreptitiously allowed them to watch baseball games on TV in his room.

The book’s tone from start to finish is subdued, matter-of-fact, and quietly good-humored. It all sounds relentlessly normal, even the events triggered by various people’s alcoholism. Up here in the early 21st century, where our belles lettrists place a premium value on personal memoir and deftness with emotionally restrained, grammatically perfect sentences, “Peripheral Visions” is so true to the genre it seems on the surface unremarkable, even dull.

But reading it is an intensely strange experience. Despite the sense of agreeableness and normalcy, peculiar feelings of isolation and hollowness seep up unnamed for page after page, like swamp gases bubbling from a serene pond. In the early childhood chapters, it’s a feeling of loneliness, hard to define because it’s never directly stated, but present on the periphery. We learn early on there’s a problem in the house with alcohol, but its effects are never identified – we just gather as the anecdotes pile up that certain, mostly unspoken emotional complications are the results of daily social drinking.

As the ’40s become the ’50s, a feeling of resentment begins to well from underneath the matter-of-fact prose. The feeling itself is decorously unspecified, except when the sentences’ emotional austerity slips: Mike observes by 1953 that the real reason his mother taught him bridge was so “she could check off another parental obligation”; and as a teenager in 1959 he identifies “the foolish and empty social forms that slowed, and even threatened to smother, the speech of so many of my friends’ mothers.”

Direct statements like these are infrequent, but the feeling of bitterness they reveal, along with other feelings of separation, isolation, uncertainty, anxiety, fear and bewilderment, underlies virtually every chapter, while at the same time the prose surface remains composed and good-humored. This is a strange and remarkable book.

In the past few decades it has been asked, even by people who were there, what could possibly have spurred comfortable, privileged white middle-American youth to social revolt in the 1960s. Before the dangers of Vietnam, which was a late development, it seems things couldn’t have been much easier for kids in the ’50s and ’60s. What did they have to complain about? This book – if you have good peripheral vision – will reveal to you the nightmares underneath the serene material surface.

The last chapter brings the midcentury American story into focus. Mike’s Cousin Jim advises him to “‘find a nice girl … and drive west,'” and he thinks: “I knew immediately this was the best advice I’d ever gotten. … Cousin Jim … had just done me the very great favor of thoroughly confirming my suspicion that the best direction for me to travel was out of here.”

“Peripheral Visions” should be read, carefully, by anyone who wants to know what really happened in America after World War II.

Farnham Blair lives in Blue Hill, and has published fiction, poems and other essays.

Dana Wilde can be reached at dana.wilde@umit.maine.edu.