THE YEAR OF SILENCE
Madison Smartt Bell
New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1987
194 pp., $15.95
It seems that we have now arrived (and perhaps our ground time here will blessedly brief) at a time and a place where youth--in and of itself, or, in the case of some of our very prominent "young" writers, apparent or self-proclaimed youth--is widely considered to be not merely a fragile fact of life, bound to be changed soon enough, come what may by the implacable and grinding attrition of spent time, but rather as a kind of providential virtue that, like the purely and simply genetic accident of outward and visible beauty or, maybe, the fortunate, blind chance of inherited wealth, is worthy of reflexive awe and admiration and of more than ample rewards. So be it. And how else could it be in this our age in which we have been urged, at times required, to know and to honor the everlasting image, not the reality? The image which, unlike the truth it spurns and distorts, will never set us free; but which is intended to keep us a whole lot happier--if, as Dean Swift asserted, happiness is the state of being well deceived.
In any case, youth is being well served in this late literary season. Attention is being paid. From the Establishment and its glossy trade journals one hears more and more about what are being called the Baby Novelists--and the Baby Editors who have risen to eminence on the youthful shoulders of their writers.
Take the case of Bret Eastern Ellis, whose new and second novel, The Rules of Attraction, has recently appeared to considerable critical attention, even the well-earned and predictably negative reviews acting, as if in a kind of cuckoo affirmation of Gresham's law, to take away space and attention from more worthwhile books. What can be said? Ellis is young, that's what. He was, after all, only twenty, or thereabouts, when Less Than Zero came along. (Amid the reams and webs of publicity it was never clear whether he wrote the book at twenty or was twenty when it abruptly surfaced.) But he gives signs already of maturing. Maybe too much for his own good. At writers conferences last summer, agents and editors were overheard announcing a concerted search (and destroy?) mission. "We're looking for a young Bret Ellis," they said. And we should not forget or ignore his Bennington classmate Jill Eisenstadt, whose From Rockaway is out there brightly in the bookstores, another youthful jape that (as the jacket copy cheerfully announces) "takes us into the closed, tribal world of a group of young lifeguards (and their friends) from Rockaway, New York." (Beach Blanket Bingo, anyone? Would you believe The Horror at Party Beach?) There's the whole celebrated motley crew from 1986's 20 Under 30, some (to use old Army terminology) overage in grade well before the book came out.
And still uncertainly young, still a vaguely new voice, there is the inimitable Tama Janowitz, already better known for her amaretto and lime juice advertisements (and for the company she kept in the latter) than she is for her well-publicized though somewhat less-than-best-selling books, including this year's tacky Cannibal in New York. Finally, towering above all, there is that role model for all restless scribbling youth, Jay McInerney, who may yet live to bring back that old TV advertisement line (was it for Geritol?): "You're as young as you feel!" It may or may not be ironic, but is
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