Volume 31, Number 17 · November 8, 1984
The Fast Lane
By Darryl Pinckney
Bright Lights, Big City
by Jay McInerney
Vintage, 182 pp., $5.95 (paper)
Fish Tales
by Nettie Jones
Random House, 175 pp., $13.95
Holden Caulfield's progeny are everywhere in American fiction—the smart-ass naif doing a tour of duty in the wrong place with a bad crowd, the misfit born on the inside yet an outsider by temperament, AWOL, at least for a while, from school, family, job, class, himself. Poor Holden, Steven, Marcus once said, was not so much a modern Huck Finn as 'a kind of midget Childe Harold.' For his heirs, the children of the blank generation, self-absorption and alienation are so common that they must work overtime at losing in order to be noticed. Not much these days can make parents or society bat an eye. Of course Junior is a mess. If the sensitive washout has no taste for extreme gestures, total self-destruction, then his hope for singularity rests in his voice. Tone is everything.
Review, 3379 words
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