the narrative covers a period... from the 1940s to the late 60s, to what extent is the period relevant to the book, in particular the 60s

    The sixties are now viewed as "a long decade" by most
historians today. Actually, they cover a span of twenty years, a continuum, from the
mid-fifties with the public reading of Howl in San Francisco by Allen Ginsberg, the
prominent beat poet, to the withdrawal of the last troops in Vietnam in 1975. A lot of
historians lay stress on the years 1968 and 1969, after Nixon's election, during which
the action of countercultural and radical movements reached a
peak.

From then on, the youth movement experienced a sort
of "utopian descent", a far more pessimistic and bitter phase which saw the surge of
violence : social uprisings in ghettos, bomb
attempts...

Merry incarnates "the hippie-turned-mad
bomb-thrower". The end of the novel is at the crossroads of the sexual revolution (and
exploitation of sex) and political corruption with the dicussion on Deep Throat and the
film industry in addition to the Watergate scandal.

Thus,
the pastoral is turned into a counterpastoral and the American Dream takes on a
distinctly nightmarish character that plunges all the characters into an abyss of
despair, into a modern version of Bunyan's "slough of
Despond". 

Yet, I wonder where the sixties are. Surely, the
sixties must be somewhere else. The sixties are Elsewhere...