Special Report: Brat Pack II

...This time, diffident, rabbity shyness will be in, and if the author happens to be pretty, his or her publicists will make sure the dust-flap photo gets blown up extra-large...

...But by now unhappiness is at hand: a major source of Alec's angst, his older brother Mark, has shown up in Tokyo to berate him about not keeping in touch with the family...

...But some of them—well, if they aren't stereotypes, then I'm staying clear of Japan...

...And there can be great pleasure in waiting...

...Can John Burnham Schwartz write...

...Tokyo is crowded and it costs a lot to play golf there...

...Like Ethan Canin, a best seller by age 27 and an inspiration of sorts to John Burnham Schwartz, he writes with hope...

...author of Bicycle Days, the story of a young man coming of age in Japan), Jonathan Ames (coming soon...

...Fortunately, Alec scurries back to Tokyo and, with a penumbra of wisdom now radiating from his being, succeeds in bedding his true love, Kiyoko, the granddaughter of the wise old pair...

...Alec says he had run away to escape the old pains and ties...

...Tonight, I would like to do that for you, Alec...

...Here's what to watch for in the next fifteen minutes...

...Lying on his futon the first night in this alien land, he thinks back to the first time he was sent off to summer camp...

...Go to the right college, get into the right MFA program, make the right contacts among established writers and book and magazine editors, find the right literary agent, who'll sell your book to the right publisher, who'll give your book the right cover and shake down the right writers (some of whom you already know, of course) for the right blurbs, and you're off...

...He has modeled for Bruce Weber and Horst...

...I like to laugh, and I like to laugh at myself...

...True to her genes, she bores us first: "Tea ceremony is about beauty and waiting," she tells Alec...

...Jonathan Ames's keepers may be carrying this bit too far, though...

...But the flames did not die, and after graduation, in a Kerouacian "three-week nonstop, no-sleep frenzy at his word processor," he wrote a novel—based on his experiences working for TRW two summers in Japan—as his thesis...

...And David Leavitt (I think I read this somewhere) is playing bass guitar in a sixties nostalgia band led by Butch "Eddie Munster" Patrick...

...Gerald Howard, an editor at W. W. Norton, described the machinery like so in the Summer 1989 American Scholar: "The proliferation of creative writing programs has made possible ab ovo a career management approach to literature...

...Now the publishing world appears ready to unleash yet another pack...

...They have reason to be depressed...

...tea ceremony teaches the art of patience...

...Nor is he a permaBrat: "Lately he has been read27 ing Plato...

...But with help from the Muse he punched his way out of the pinstriped suit...

...At present only two of the novels are available for serious study (Bicycle Days and I Pass Like Night, published by Summit Books and William Morrow, respectively) and only Bicycle Days has gone through the entire hype cycle...

...Finally, keep an eye on the all-important angling for Off-the-BookPage Coverage...

...In Yamadera, these are the important things, Alec...

...In a purely non-autobiographical coincidence, the exact, same thing happened to Schwartz when he was at Choate...

...No, not the coming-of-age part: that's old news...

...Thoughtful reviewers will notice that I philistinishly haven't said a word about . . . the work...

...In Tokyo, in the cities, these things are no longer important...

...I know 26 isn't that old, but it's my whole life...

...Mark yells: "I guess it's my fault for thinking that family still meant something to you...

...In terms of setting the pace for peers who will follow, he's shaping up to be the McInerney of his Generation, and the marketing of this talented, brooding youth featured a few interesting twists that I feel sure we'll see again...

...Brat Pack I never marched in lockstep—there were grim writers (Ellis, for example) and gentle writers (Leavitt)—but the official line, as pushed this summer by Schwartz's handlers, is that most all of them were sour-faced nihilist snots...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 the tale of a young man from the suburbs coming of age on New York's angsty streets), Marti Leimbach (Dying Young, about a young man coming of age while dying), Eric Swanson (The Greenhouse Effect, a tale of a young man coming of age while trying to make it as an actor in New York), and David Lipsky (Three Thousand Dollars, a book of short stories, most of them satirical looks at young men coming of age haphazardly in prep school and the Ivy League...

...With Grandfather, you can practice fishing and chopping wood...

...After this Alec steals a bike, gets jailed, yells at his boss, brattily ignores Kiyoko until she breaks up with him, Grandfather dies—making Alec feel quasi-filial loss—and eventually he does the right thing: he quits his job and goes home to family...

...For the rest—well, we don't know yet, but we'll doubtless hear all about them soon enough...

...In the official version of how Schwartz came to the attention of superagent Amanda "Binky" Urban, Halberstam served as the go-between and drill sergeant who pushed Schwartz hard during rewrite time...

...Tama Janowitz pioneered this, but her techniques—the three-foot-high fright wig, Amaretto ads, and crashing into the Four Seasons to hand out leaflets touting her book—are out...

...ding himself...

...Marti Leimbach did this brilliantly in USA Today when she groused, "The word 'potential' implies what we have in front of us isn't up to par...

...Especially Northern Japan, where Alec spends a weekend learning the ways of the Pat-Morita-inthe-Karate-Kid-like grandparents of the Japanese woman he loves...

...Even his dour boss, Mr...

...Times, at Harvard "he staged a `tumultuous' freshman year with mandatory complements of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll...

...And you're too goddamn selfish...

...But he's not nearly as good as the hypesters would have you believe, and if we follow the Leimbach Dictum that age shouldn't be factored into considerations of literary merit, the novel falls short of half-assed...

...For Ames, it was Princeton faculty member Joyce Carol Oates...

...Ames sagely downplayed this fact in an interview, saying he only modeled for a few weeks (in one widely seen print ad, he sported about in red underwear Returning from a trip to Maui with his mother, Schwartz impulsively scribbled a short story on an air sickness bag, titled, "A Sensitive Man of the '80s...

...Meanwhile, the same youth-disgorging publishing machinery that helped create them (and that they helped create) is serving up fresh fresh new voices...

...T here is a glimmer of hope that BP 1 II may not be uniformly wussy, and that is Jonathan Ames's I Pass Like Night...

...Japanese think Americans are big and hairy...

...Schwartz] radiates none of the I've-seen-it-all, tried-it-all, smoked-it-all and drunk-itall qualities that characterize many of his comrades in the burgeoning literary Brat Pack of auteurs under the age of 30," the Los Angeles Times's Elizabeth Mehren gushed...

...Alex, though, means to do it...

...Ames, with his tousled blond hair and sweaty, chiseled face, is blurbed like so on the back of I Pass Like Night: "Jonathan Ames . . . is the winner of a Henfield/ Transatlantic Review award...

...We'll see variations on this one...

...I'm a positive person, I guess,' Schwartz [says...

...29...

...All of them followed-up their first books with resounding bombs, and there's a has-beenish feel to this bunch...

...with three scantily clad women), but a telling irony occurs in his novel, when the protagonist muses, "If my mind really takes off I start projecting down the road a few months and I see blackand-white pictures of myself in Vanity Fair . . ." Ames says he has already been thus featured—as author, not model—in the magazine's section on hot new faces...

...But it was an accident...

...Some young writers will focus only on the alleged liabilities of being a young writer...

...Unfortunately this is the kinder-gentlerized version, so we don't get that...

...And I'm sorry, but that's when I began to miss the old McInerney/Ellis sex-and-drug romps through nightclubs...

...In the unofficial, rumored version, which Urban denies, Urban is the old family friend, and there was no go-between...

...This past summer, as you probably noticed unless you were in Auckland, was the Season of Schwartz...

...This is what caught Binky's eye...

...that was the staple of BP I writers—they . . . get divorced when Alec is 15...

...But life's too short to waste time thinking about family, isn't it...

...It hadn't been his decision—not the way it had been later, when he went away to school . . ." Yes, this boy is mad at his family...

...the Japanese don't like Koreans...

...Susan Minot has a streak of gray in her mop...

...And at the end (refreshingly, following the Schwartzian nicefest), there is no sign his anti-hero, Alex, will reform...

...And my fault for thinking you'd be there for me when I needed you...

...As much as I can, I do.' " And unlike BP I writers, Schwartz is not a self-obsessed navel gazer...

...John retreated to Nantucket, where he further paid his dues spending a hellish year in a vacation cottage rewriting the book four times...

...How old are you supposed to be before you write a book...

...Somebody re-up this kid's contract, pronto...

...But, extrapolating from this sample, you can expect that a large proportion of the fresh new voices who whine down the pike in the next few years will be from the Ivy League, the smaller elite northeastern private schools, or (the farm system) the University of Iowa, because the network that produced Bret Easton Ellis is still in place...

...He seems eager, not bored or blas...

...Reviewers have lauded the book for its sparkling, original insights into Japanese culture, but I just don't know...

...Oh, I suppose...

...I can't honestly recommend it (for more details from this novel, see my Official Brat Pack II Literary Motif Sameness Chart, on the page opposite), but I hope he doesn't get handled as roughly as I think he will...

...And with Grandmother, you can practice cooking...

...Also, look for this quote in months ahead: "I don't want the media to do a Bret Ellis on me...

...F or Schwartz, who was at once young, well-off, and well-connected—he prepped at Choate, went to college at Harvard, and had a job lined up at First Boston upon graduation—the trick was to prove that these things were in fact obstacles that stood between a young man and his art...

...Bret Easton Ellis, in his mid-twenties, looks as weighed down and jowly as the Final Days Nixon...

...Japanese businessmen are proud, mysterious, and do gross things to Filipino prostitutes...

...Schwartz got heavy mentorial fondling from David Halberstam, an old family friend...

...He had not wanted to go away then," we read in Chapter `M...

...Japanese women don't respond to come-ons by foreigners...

...To make you wait and give you pleasure...

...I really enjoy people...

...A few of the characters are interesting—I of course especially liked the Korean, Park, who takes Alec to a club where Japanese businessmen play Rock, Paper, and Scissors to see who gets to strip naked and go onstage to receive manual dexterity demonstrations from prostitutes...

...Ames is writing in what might be called the "classical" Brat Pack mode: his novel is the story of a very, very, very confused bisexual young man who takes drugs, sleeps with virtually anybody of any sex, and is about three clicks angrier than the Tasmanian Devil...

...According to the L. A. Times piece, at age 19 John, returning from a trip to Maui with his mother and stepfather (the poet W. S. Merwin), impulsively scribbled a short story on an air sickness bag, titled, "A Sensitive Man of the 80s...

...I made him meaner than I am," Ames told me in an interview...

...I want to find out what fits where...

...He had cried and screamed at his parents...

...I've never been to Japan, but I knew all these things from reading Junior Scholastic...

...many Japanese slurp when they eat...

...Not one character takes drugs or undergoes a crisis of gender identification, the staples of what his editor, Ileene Smith, calls 'all those fashionable and extremely irritating books' by young writers who seem to take negativity pills along with their morning coffee...

...Schwartz went to Harvard...

...In Ransom, by contrast, the headstrong hero didn't do this, and as a result got killed in a Samurai fight with an ex-Marine...

...USA Today recently published a feature on a horde of very young Ivy League writers—all but one are 26 or under—who will soon be in our faces: among others, John Burnham Schwartz (in our faces already...

...They argue, in the process stomping the old theater injunction "Show Me, Don't Tell Me" flatter than a Kansas roadkill...

...In response, he told the L.A...

...As it turns out, the dramatic nut here is that Mom and Dad—no, they didn't die...

...Jay McInerney used a similar plotline in his Japan novel, Ransom, though in that case the disgruntled family member was dad...

...Here we had a 33-yearold talking about staving off the Fitzgeraldian "crackup," which traditionally hasn't been a source of worry until the midlife downturn of a career—at age 45 or 50...

...What we do get, in the novel's first half, are whimsical, occasionally funny and sharp sketches of Tokyo life that keep the novel on autopilot until Schwartz has to return to Alec's divorce-caused angst...

...At Harvard he majored in East Asian studies and took economics classes—all in preparation for the philistine career in banking...

...I would like to have a world view that is larger than the one I have.' " The second gambit of note was the Preemptive Strike Against the "Privileged Youth" Issue...

...Inside the house, as Alec chops an onion with Zen carefulness, Grandmother explains that simple acts have much meaning...

...Just leave me in peace to practice my craft...

...author of I Pass Like Night, Alex Heard is a Washington writer...

...Joe Boon, agrees this is good...

...See any useful patterns...

...Successfully, too...

...Among the things we learn are: Japanese are chauvinistic...

...Why not?' he said...

...I did that to a friend when I was a kid...

...Schwartz's boyish good looks have not gone unnoticed...

...Just be careful you don't get the same treatment if you ever try to come back home...

...Apparently he failed: on the cover of the July Esquire, McInerney, maddened by nasty reviews of Story of My Life, is in a Ninja suit, waving a sword with which he intends to "skewer his critics...

...Alex has a gentle side too, which emerges in his encounters with street people, but Ames does what he can to suppress it...

...It's not that simple, obviously, but anyone who thinks the right school and well-placed mentors don't help is kidAlex Heard BRAT PACK II It seems like days—or is it weeks?—since the original literary Brat Pack of Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, Bret Easton Ellis, et al...

...had us under siege...

...M ost of these writers are going to disappear from sight faster than a burger placed in front of Wimpy, and it's interesting, in a morbid way, to watch what the publishers do to achieve maximum hype-istic frenzy while they last...

...The hero, Alec, arrives in Tokyo after graduating—from Yale—and meets the host family with whom he will stay during his trial year at an American firm, Compucom, Inc...

...Lest he be accused of creating an autobiographical character," the L. A. Times said, "Schwartz . . . disguises Alec by making him a student at Yale...

...Grandfather takes Alec fishing, but Alec, he too impatient and scare fish away while Grandfather, he patient and fill up creel with trout...

...Tama Janowitz, in about an hour, went from being the literary equivalent of the young Carol Channing (the quirky, darling one people liked) to the old Carol Channing (the quirky, ridiculous one who chases down blondes in the street and tries to buy their hair for her wigs...

...First, predictably, was vociferous Disassociation from the Original Brat Pack...

...The] backjacket cover is a windblown portrait showing off his thick sheaf of hair, intense eyes, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 and open face," sighed New York...

...Ellis, you will recall, was a student at Bennington when his mentor, Joe McGinniss, dispatched his stuff to hip young Simon and Schuster editor Morgan Entrekin, at which point the wheels started turning and didn't stop until millions of people were crushed under the bathos juggernaut that was Less Than Zero: The Movie...

...and Americans are better at baseball...

...There's one scene where Alex hooks his best friend in the face with a fishing lure while casting off a pier...

...I realized that I'd been on a track all my life," he told New York, "from Choate to Harvard, and whole parts of my life had gotten submerged...

...many Japanese youth are attracted to Western ways...