WHY IS THERE NO LITERARY ‘BRAT PACK’ TODAY?

Suspects include elite anti-intellectualism, the corporate fear of art, and the failure to clone Sally Rooney

The novelists Fernanda Eberstadt and Bret Easton Ellis (feet, hands, forehead) appearing on William F. Buckley’s PBS chat show Firing Line in 1985.

An article about the publishing industry came out the other weekend in Air Mail and made the rounds. The piece, by Louis Cheslow, combines some conventional wisdom about the biz—that it’s hit driven, with a few big new titles (plus the backlist, unmentioned), floating the many books that don’t earn out; that large advances don’t translate into sales—with an odd set of claims about young writers, most of them from unnamed editors, presumably from corporate houses. Illustrated with a portrait of Tama Janowitz, whose first book Slaves of New York placed her among the literary “brat pack” of the 1980s along with Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, the article leaves the impression that the problem with books today is that the young writers, especially those somehow inhabiting downtown—either as tenants in apartments there or as contributors to magazines that hold readings there—aren’t living up to the legacy of their glorious predecessors from the Reagan administration.