Writers

The Next Generation

Like anybody who reads, I am concerned about the new generation of writers. By this I mean people my age, who are in college or have recently graduated and who plan on writing. My concerns are two-fold, but there is some hope. There is even some excitement. To speculate about what the future crop of writers will look like, we can look to the current crop, the “post-post-modernists,” the “Gen-Xers.” These are people such as Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, and Michael Chabon. I am acquainted with several of these writers only well enough to know that I dislike Michael Chabon’s writing, although I did like the film Wonder Boys, and have an on-the-fence liking of Dave Eggers, having laughed loudly at some clever things he has written while simultaneously hoping that I never meet him in person. The few short pieces I’ve read by Jonathan Lethem I thought were solid enough. But I can summarize them all as being part of the contemporary generation of literary writers that has no particular name. Just as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were the writers of the “Lost Generation” and Norman Mailer and James Jones were post-WWII writers, the two Jonathans, Dave, and Michael are part of the…um…what do we call these days? The most obvious bad news is that none of these writers—yes, I’m making an assumption about the ones I have not read—can lay a finger on Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Mailer or Jones. The quality of literature really has declined. Eggers is inclined to writing short, sharp sentences that he tries to pass off as their own paragraph. He layers irony upon irony, while being unable to write a heartfelt ironic story in the vein of Hemingway’s Indian Camp (for example). Chabon writes these whimsical, sentimental tales that sound long-winded and forced to me. And now two more writers of the same generation have come to mind: the late David Foster Wallace and the truly obnoxious Chuck Palahniuk. Chuck Palahniuk has written the same book more than a dozen times. By that I mean he rearranges the words in each sentence, turns the level of outrageousness up or down, slaps on a narrative tone (always first-person) and calls it a book. Foster Wallace appears to be the most popular of all these guys, especially after his death. I’ve never read him either. All I can say about him is the idea of writing a 2,000 page book which is called your masterpiece to me is always suspect. My fear is that this nameless group of writers—the Gen-Xers, the post-post-modernists—will be the only writers influencing the Gen-Yers. It isn’t that I think they’re untalented (except for Palahniuk) or that they are egotistical enough to think they are a great generation of literary artists. But if it is primarily their voices and themes that carry over to the minds of my generation, then we have something to worry about. The writers of the Gen-X period tend towards genre-mash-ups and existentialist postures. They write about characters who are bored out of their minds if they aren’t whining. None of their books concern real experience. Their stories have more to do with an elite, ironic, information-age experience of reusing and discarding earlier stories and earlier writers. None of it feels real. But again, these writers are so hip, that “that’s the point.” I believe that the literature of Generation Y may rise above the previous generation, though. We have lived through some profound cultural experiences that have shaped our youth: 9/11, environmental disasters, economic downturns. We are a generation that is so over-entitled, that there is no way we will be able to get what we want when we’re older. There is no way we will be as rich as previous generations. The writers of Generation X lived through the post-hippie era, the slow collapse of the Soviet Union and Reaganomics. They were also super-entitled, and got exactly what they wanted, and became prosperous. What do you get when you live through a fairy tale with a bow-tied ending? A bunch of artists resorting to irony, self-deprecation, and re-packaging. So my simple hope is that my generation has experienced times uncertain enough, shaky enough, and almost apocalyptic enough, to churn out a few interesting stories. But I could be wrong. As it happens, the wave of writers from Generation Y has already started, because the older end of the generation is now in their early 30’s. I’ll be looking for signs of life out there. In conclusion, check out the books of Generation X that we have in Snell Library, and see if they have some merits (or faults) I may have missed. I’d like to hear some examples of very recent, Generation Y writers we have in stock as well.

Hole in My Life

I would heartily recommend Jack Ganto’s memoir Hole in my Life as a good read for anytime at all. The main reason that I believe it could be read at anytime (and by anybody, whatever your overall reading habits are) is that it is one of the simpler and more economical books that I’ve ever read, making it easy to get through in about three days–the length it took me. The book follows the young Jack Gantos, and his struggles to become a writer, which turn out to be rather more drastic than the ordinary struggles of aspiring writers. While working for his father’s construction company down in St. Croix in the early seventies– at that time run amok with race-riots and crime– Gantos is offered a job on a sailing boat by one of his father’s shadier customers. The nature of the job is to deliver two thousand pounds of hash buried on a nearby island to New York, where Gantos would then recieve ten thousand dollars for his services. Gantos immediately accepts the job because of the money, which he plans to use to pay his college tuition. He also thinks that getting wild life experience of any kind is the key to becoming a great writer, and so he largely overlooks the simple fact that what he is doing is seriously illegal. From that point on, he sails with the captain, a prickly english drug-smuggler named Hamilton, up to New York, everything going smoothly up until and after arrival. But then, Gantos and his companions start to notice a car that has been following them while they are driving back from upstate New York. Then, they hear that their boat was searched one night while they were gone. It all culminates in the FBI busting in on them at their Chelsea hotel and arresting Hamilton. Gantos, ever the one for adventure, briefly escapes, but is soon forced to turn himself over to the FBI, as they have at least as much information on him as they did on his partners and informed his family about all his activities. Gantos is sentenced to an uncertain amount of time in a federal prison; anywhere between sixty days and six years. He begins serving time in the truly ugly world prison racked with guilt, fear and regret. I came about this book myself in a somewhat unusual way; one of my professors, who vaguely knows the author from her job at Emerson, bought me the book as an end of the semester present, saying that she thought I would enjoy it. (I was not an exception in the class; every one recieved a book). I  started reading it that same day and finished it some fifteen minutes ago as of this writing. Gantos actually has a background in mostly children’s literature, and while this book is certainly not for children, this background comes through in the writing. Everything is stated in a matter-of-a-fact, unsensational way, the vocabulary is simple and straightforward and Gantos portrays himself in a way that anybody else could emotionally relate to, even though some of the early chapters reveal a predilection towards recklessness that do make him a unique and worrisome character. What Gantos goes through is far more painful than what the average idealist in their early twenties has to go through and if anything, will leave you telling yourself ‘I will never, ever go to prison.’ At the same time, I was sometimes faced with the strange envy that I haven’t had quite this interesting a life; that is, the same envy Gantos felt about other writers, leading him to make such a massive mistake. But this is an emotion that evaporates for Gantos while he is in prison. The book is ultimately reassuring. As he writes in one passage; ‘Prison may have been serious, but from within it, looking out my cell window, I knew life outside prison was more interesting.’