LEAP YEAR
Peter Cameron
New York: Harper & Row, 1990
245 pp., $18.95
Whatever happened to the Literary Brat Pack? A few years ago, this circle of young novelists and short-story writers seemed to be on the verge of dominating the American literary landscape. And no wonder: From the moment their books and stories began to appear, it was obvious that their flat, affectless narratives - populated, as they were, by baby-boom protagonists and by their friends, lovers, siblings, and parents, and crowded with the names of movies, TV game shows, popular songs, and various upscale consumer items - were tailor-made to appeal to the superficial yuppie sensibility of the 1980s. In one yarn after another, the Literary Brat Packers put heir mostly upper-middle-class, suburban-reared heroes through familiar baby-boom paces: They began lives in their own in the big city (usually New York), working in publishing houses or second-hand clothing stores; they had colorful, frustrating love affairs (invariably with other upper-middle-class, suburban-reared baby-boomers); they came out of the closet to their families; they watched their aging mothers divorce or come down with cancer or die.
Even more astonishing than the thematic parallels among all these stories were the similarities in manner. Heavily influenced by such older writers as Ann Beattie and the late Raymond Carver, the Literary Brat Pack operated on the assumption that the best way to convey the sense of the character was not to scrutinize his heart but to describe his furniture, to catalog the contents of his closest and kitchen cabinets, to transcribe his grocery lists and the slogans on his T-shirts. Yet somehow it didn't seem to work very well: The characters in Literary Brat Pack stories and novels usually had a tough time taking on dimension. After one had read a few of these stories, everything one came across seemed vaguely familiar: All the sensitive young gay men seemed to be the same sensitive young gay man; all the intelligent, distant, emotionally self-protective mothers seemed to be the same intelligent, distant, emotionally self-protective mother. To be sure, many members of the Literary Brat Pack had graduated from prestigious creative-writing programs, and they knew very well, from a technical point of view, how to put together a piece of fiction. The problem with their stories, as a rule, was not that they weren't well crafted; on the contrary, they were often very well crafted. The problem was that they were empty.
Readers first became aware of the Literary Brat pack as a phenomenon sometime around 1984. That was the year when a recent Yale graduate named David Leavitt published his first book, a short-story collection called Family Dancing. At first the critics were lukewarm or indifferent. Then Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times gave Family Dancing a rave review - and the next thing one knew, Leavitt and his stories were the talk of the literary world. In the end, Family Dancing didn't hit the best-seller lists, but it was a success d'estime and then some; Leavitt became the youngest person ever nominated fro a National Book Critics Circle Award, and his name shot to the top of nearly everyone's list of Promising Young American Writers. To be sure, this celebrity was not entirely undeserved: there were a couple of admirable short stories in Family Dancing, stories whose characters one believed in and cared about, stories that communicated genuine feeling. But most of them were bland, callow,
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