20 UNDER 30
Best Stories by America's New Young Writers
Edited by Debra Spark
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986
Paperback, $7.95
It would be difficult, not to mention churlish, to find fault with the concept behind Scribner's new anthology of short stories, 20 Under 30. Edited by Debra Spark, the collection assembles twenty stunningly well-crafted short stories by writers under the age of thirty. A few of them David Leavitt, David Updike, Leigh Allison Wilson have already begun to make names for themselves in major publications and books of their own. The majority of the rest have, until now, achieved recognition primarily among the cognoscenti: among people who read literary magazines, or who are associated with one of the myriad writing programs that have sprung up and now cling, unkillable as kudzoo, to colleges and universities around the country.
The anthology is a laudable project, well conceived and well executed. The print is easy to read, and the cover sports a tasteful modernist painting whose perfection of form and utter vagueness of meaning seem particularly suited to the works in this collection.
Reading the stories, one realizes immediately that something has changed in American literature; gone, it seems, are the days when young writers were driven to write out of a sense of social outrage, or a desire to change things, or curiosity about how other people live. Gone are the days when a young writer went "on the road" to discover a hidden truth about society. Displayed here are writers looking at themselves, and each other, for the truth: middle or upper-middle class young adults writing stories about and for middle or upper middle-class young adults, writers whose protagonists are worried not so much about poverty, or war, or social injustice, as about their screwed up families and their own ongoing, or recently disintegrated, "relationships."
Displayed here are writers crafting polite, discreet, and above all, aesthetically pleasing stories-stories more notable for what they do not contain, than for what they do. These stories contain no violence, very little sex, and astonishingly only one fleeting mention of drugs. In the entire collection there is not one laid off steelworker, not one coal miner, not one bum, not one soldier, not one sharecropper, not one Hispanic or Asian immigrant. There is one story about blacks. None of the other stories contains so much as a black character, except for Leigh Allison Wilson's "The Raising," in which there is one boy who is a little on the dark side.
Nearly all the stories concern families in some way. Many are told from the viewpoint of a child. Yet strangely enough the stories as a whole leave one with the impression that "America's new young writers," as Scribner's rather redundantly calls them, are neither new, nor young; that their work is distinguished not by youthful passion, nor youthful idealism, nor even the youthful desire to shock and offend, but rather by the fact that these writers are, or feel themselves, exceedingly old. Like David Leavitt's eleven-year-old character Nina in his story "Aliens," today's new young writers seem to be afflicted by premature aging. "We'd seen pictures of them wizened, hoary four-year-olds, their skin loose and wrinkled,
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