LESS THAN ZERO
Bret Easton Ellis
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985
208 pp., $15.95
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY
Jay McInerney
New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1984
182 pp., $5.95
Much as the American intelligentsia like to ridicule the absurd spectacle of the beauty pageant, with its vulgarity and its exploitation of women, they regularly indulge in a periodic ritual of their own, which, if less formalized, nonetheless adheres to strict set of unwritten rules. It might be called the Bright Young Novelist Awards, or the Voice of a New Generation Pageant. The contestants must be young, preferably from an Ivy League or elite New England College, where they imbibed the right opinions from Resident Novelists and other cultural heroes on the lecture circuit. A little foreign travel helps--a mere hint of the expatriate is enough. An extra option that brings bonus points involves publishing a few book reviews or travel pieces in Village Voice, Boston Phoenix, or one of the literary quarterlies. Entry to the competition is limited to those who have published their First Novel, which, if at all possible, ought to feature a young protagonist achieving initiation by distancing himself (or herself) from the contemporary youth culture.
But just as potential beauty queens are often "spotted" by agents, so the Bright Young Novelist is "discovered" by a major New York publisher (provincial publishers entail automatic disqualification). The winners are showered with lavish praises--at least on the paperback edition of their First Novel--by previous winners who have gained minor reputations in literary circles. The future of the Bright Young Novelist is similar to that of the beauty queen; some fade into oblivion within a couple of years, others become moderately successful in some marginal genre, and a very few become big-time culture heroes in their own right.
The latest winners (or perhaps victims) of this pageant are Jay McInerney as what might be called a "strong traditional candidate": he fits all the categories neatly. Bright Lights, Big City went immediately into a paperback edition known as "Vintage Contemporaries" and carries the blessings of Raymond Carver and Thomas McGuane("terrific," "rambunctious"), both authors in the same series. Ellis, still a 21-year-old student at Bennington College, leapfrogged directly into the limelight: he was discovered by novelist Joe McGuinness and championed by Simon and Schuster senior editor Robert Asahina (Who calls Ellis "totally original"). The dust jacket encomiums for Less Than Zero reached a fever pitch. Ellis was compared to Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, William Burroughs, Jim Morrison, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This "new master of youthful American alienation" has produced a "powerfully explicit rendering of a contemporary 'lost generation'" "filled with languid comic terror" and dialogue that "sings of sour breath and one-night stands."
The Conspiracy of Youth and Age
Of course, for all the frenzy created by Ellis and McInerney, the search for the "voice of a new generation" has been with us at
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