All the Writer Pals of Yore

The 10/17/11 issue of New York Magazine includes an article titled "Just Kids," by Evan Hughes, about several of our most prominent American authors when they were young and just starting out as writers. (The title is apparently a reference to Patti Smith's book about Robert Mapplethorpe's and her early days as artists, also young and just starting out.) The immediate occasion of the article is the new Jeffrey Eugenides novel, "The Marriage Plot," and speculation about which of his writer friends are represented in this novel, which may or may not be a roman a clef. Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr, Rick Moody, and other now-successful writers were all friends or at least literary acquaintances in their twenties and onwards, mostly ending up in New York, well before any of them became famous. They both supported and competed with each other, often drank too much, and in the case of Wallace and Karr, had a romantic if somewhat unusual relationship. The others all admired Wallace's work, yet worried about him, and were all devastated but not truly surprised when the troubled author committed suicide. Underlying the intriguing and sometimes quite revealing discussion of these writers' personal careers and connections is a description of the way their work moved from, in their early years, a new approach to "formal innovation in an effort to honor their literary forebears [such as Pynchon and Barth] and 'make it new,'" to, in their middle years (the present) "the familiar pleasures of emotional storytelling - and creat[ing] a new audience for serious, stylish prose." This New York article is an odd but fascinating mix of literary gossip and a genuine if perhaps not very deep engagement with the question of how these leading contemporary writers evolved in their literary works.