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By Root 829 0

the young writer has come into the public consciousness in this and only this compromised fashion: he or she becomes the writer one must read just then not because his or her work is good, but because it represents something about the moment, or about the youthful cohort from which the writer sprung. Here is Frank Bruni, in his famously execrable feature-length profile of David Foster Wallace (“The Grunge American Novel”) for the New York Times Magazine in 1996:

The critics aren’t the only ones angling to prove that they get it. Wallace’s contemporaries have shown up at his public appearances in force. When he read at K.G.B., Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of “Prozac Nation,” claimed a spot near the front of the room. The following night, at another jampacked reading, this time at Tower Books in the Village, Ethan Hawke lurked in the back. And at the official book party two nights later at an East Village club, M. G. Lord, the author of “Forever Barbie,” can be seen chatting up another novelist of the moment, A. M. Homes. Between puffs of their cigarettes, many people whisper what Wallace says he does not want to hear: he is the current “it” boy of contemporary fiction.

Infinite Jest came out a year before Roth’s American Pastoral; but rereading Bruni’s tripe today we can understand why even as the latter book, the work of an older writer, could be immediately apprehended—as if from fifty years’ distance—as a thing at least striving toward a kind of timelessness, we were forced for years to see the former, though in its actual printed text a far more ambitious and writerly and even profound work of art, as a defunct media phenomenon of its moment. Too many articles in 1996 told us how cool Wallace and his novel were for us to properly see either as great. 1

So it has been for all the waves and waves of piercingly yet fleetingly important young writers, ever since the literary brat pack strutted around the New York of the media’s imagination. A by no means exhaustive list of such writers would include not just the aforereferenced Franzen, Lethem, Wurtzel, Lord, and Homes, but also Donna Tartt, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, Arthur Phillips, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, James Frey, Benjamin Kunkel, Marisha Pessl, and countless more in between. While Frank Bruni has been mercifully dispatched to the Dining desk, we may still rely on the Times Magazine to provide us, at regular intervals, with impeccably timed hyperventilation about some young novelist. At the time of this writing, it was one Charles Bock, a lean, attractive New Yorker who had published a novel about Las Vegas called Beautiful Children. The novel had taken Bock a harrowing eleven years to complete, and at thirty-eight, the magazine noted, he was “a little old to be a first novelist”; but nevertheless in the story’s lead, the reporter (former Times book-review editor Charles McGrath) makes clear who this piece was really about and for: the gang from which Bock had graduated. “You can spot them in coffee shops in Brooklyn and the West Village, clicking away on their laptops—when they’re not wasting time on Gawker, that is,” McGrath wrote, in a particularly Brunian motion. “You also see them at readings at Housing Works, KGB Bar and the Half King, dressed in black, leaning forward intently and sometimes venturing to ask a probing question. They idolize Lethem, Chabon, Eggers.” They are what make this piece important, the young writers as a class, standing in for young urbanites as a class, the inevitable appearance of the hipster throng serving to yoke the writer and his work to a particular demographic at a particular moment: portrait of the artist as instantiation of a trend.

Why does the media keep doing it to us—and to them? Why do reporters persist in coronating “it-boys” and (less often) “it-girls,” asking them to stand in for a generation and an era, even though this act is utterly fatal to how a reading public will apprehend their work over time? One might even say that the it-children (to coin a collective gender-neutral noun) are killing literature,