[In the following positive review, Cook praises Gold's journalistic style in Bohemia.]

Herbert Gold, dependably fine novelist and wonderful short-story writer, has for years maintained an identity that, if not exactly secret, is not sufficiently known. He is also a journalist. Unless you read the travel magazines for which he often writes, including Playboy, and his hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, this facet of his talent may have escaped your attention altogether. True, he did publish a collection of his pieces, A Walk on the West Side, 10 or 12 years ago, but it was probably the least read of all his books (well over a score of them, by the way).

And let's get things straight. Herbert Gold is not just a journalist—he's a superb journalist. Writing in that mode, he casts off his usual style in fiction—economical, forthright, straight-ahead—in favor of a witty ironic, allusive prose, so swift that the reader often finds himself surprised, laughing out loud before he even realizes a punchline was on its way. That style alone would be enough to send the contributors to Vanity Fair into a chorus of envious wailing and gnashing of teeth.

All this understood, you will see that for me to call Bohemia a work of journalism is no slight. How to describe it? It is partly a memoir, partly a kind of wacked-out travel book, and partly (though I blush to use the word) a lifestyle book.

Gold's credentials are certainly in order. He made early forays into Greenwich Village as a student at Columbia. And he's been a fully licensed Bohemian ever since he took his young wife off to Paris just after the war on a Fulbright and spent his time writing fiction and digging the cafe scene. When that marriage broke up in the '50s, he fled Detroit, where he was teaching, and hied himself off again to the Village. There he lived not so much by his pen as by his clattering typewriter, churning out short stories, essays and reviews, becoming acquainted with all the usual suspects—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Seymour Krim and Larry Rivers. His adventures in that New York milieu, some of which he recounts fleetingly here, were detailed and embellished in one of his best novels, Salt. Today he lives where he has for decades now, in San Francisco, up Russian Hill from North Beach and right next to Chinatown—prime Bohemian territory. So he knows it, and he has lived it.

And what he does not know from past experience, he has at least visited. He takes us to some surviving enclaves—to Coconut Grove in Miami, Venice in Los Angeles, to Bolinas just north of San Francisco and to the drug-infested, crime-ridden new Bohemia of New York on the lower East Side. But, as Gold instructs us, “Americans are the Johnny Appleseeds of Bohemia, fertilizing everywhere …” In their desire to be “elsewhere,” Americans have taken the spirit and style with them to distant outposts, a few of which we look in on with him—Palma on the island of Majorca, La Paz down on Baja, even the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.

His point, and it is well taken, is that Bohemia has become an acceptable, even desirable lifestyle all around America, and indeed the world over. The fringe life lived by the artistic few and their hangers-on up until the '50s burgeoned through succeeding decades until today it can be found in every big university town, in working-class cities like Milwaukee and Detroit, as well as in an upscale version in places like La Jolla and Mill Valley, Calif. Does work get done? Art get created? Some does, of course. But it's in dress, taste and attitude, and in the ritual of “hanging out,” that this has become a kind of mass movement—Bohemia for the millions, or at least for the hundreds of thousands.

All this makes the book sound far more sociological and sober than it is. It is told in the first-person: What Herbert Gold does not remember from his past he gives as eyewitness testimony. And remember that wonderful style of his that I burbled about in the beginning? It is everywhere in evidence. He can throw out a Wildean epigram—“Old age is wasted on the elderly: the young know what to do with it—insist on something different.” Or he can remark on his own naiveté at a Bohemian gathering he attended in his youth, “Some of the women wore long skirts to their ankles. Fat legs didn't occur to me; what occurred to me was sexy, European, depraved.” And he can tell stories of Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs that, while hilarious, would not pass muster even here in the book pages.

Bohemia is a fast, funny tour through territory most of us have visited, if only in our fantasies. The tour guide knows it well. Trust him.