I know it should be depressing that none of these writers has survived in any important way (except Wolitzer), but in the cases of Texier, McInerny, and Janowitz, I’m ecstatic.

If Texier and Vendela Vida ever met, a rip in the fabric of time would occur and suck the entire universe into a doppelganger black hole.

A different twist on the literary life in 1980’s New York clubs replacing
cafes, and roaming bands of authors stalking the night streets from Area to
Palladium to Nell’s. Jay McInerney’s best-selling 1984 novel, ”Bright Lights,
Big City,” with its aspiring-writer hero, created a hip New York where
late-night clubs and cocaine blurs collide with literary ambition. Tama
Janowitz’s ”Slaves of New York,” published last year, carries on the image, in
stories full of struggling artists, devious gallery owners, desperate
hangers-on, all willfully imprisoned by their need to be trendy in the city. But
these muddled, hard-partying characters – when would they ever find the time, or
the clearheadedness, to write? – are fictional exaggerations.

In reality, for many young writers today, New York is a base where they can
strive and grow until they become successful enough, or frustrated enough, to
leave for a while – to spend the summer at a tranquil writers’ colony or to make
money teaching for a year – always returning to replenish themselves in the
literary waters, and hit some gossip-filled book parties to make contacts with
editors, agents and publishers.

Just glance at the itineraries of some of New York’s hottest young writers.
Jay McInerney, who is 33, spent half of last year in Ann Arbor, where his
then-wife was finishing her Ph.D. Tama Janowitz, 30, has a fellowship at
Princeton University this year. David Leavitt, the short-story writer whose
first novel is ”The Lost Language of Cranes,” lives on Long Island. Meg
Wolitzer, author of ”Hidden Pictures,” has been teaching upstate. Kathy Acker
(whose latest novel is called ”Don Quixote”) the determinedly punkish
38-year-old author identified with downtown Manhattan has lived in London for
the last two years. But New York has lost none of its cachet or importance for
these writers; no matter where their legal residence, they seem to spend as much
time in the city as out of it. They represent the city’s new literary life.

This is no longer the place where, as in years gone by, literary circles had
real coherence, where the mention of the journal Partisan Review conjured up an
image of like-minded intellectuals. In New York today young authors live in a
swifter-than-sound atmosphere, full of energy, hype and distractions. The change
reflects new realities in the city and in the publishing industry: higher rents
and tougher urban living combined with pressure to bring out a book of fiction
before the first blush of youth has passed. So aspiring authors find themselves
on a harshly competitive fast track as soon as they are out of college or
graduate writing programs – if not before. No wonder they have little time or
taste for Bloomsbury-cozy salons or Hemingway-macho feuds.

Instead, there is a dense network of overlapping circles, formed from tiny
cells: Jay McInerney and his friends, the flashy, successful editors Gary
Fisketjon, and Morgan Entrekin; the trio of precocious whiz kids, Leavitt,
Wolitzer and Glickman – whose first novel, ”Years From Now,” will be published
this summer – and a larger clan of authors in their late 20’s and 30’s who have
passed through Columbia University’s writing courses. The Columbia alumni
include Mona Simpson, whose first novel, ”Anywhere But Here,” was published to
extravagant praise this year, Amy Hempel, author of the short-story collection
”Reasons to Live,” and Susan Minot, whose first novel, ”Monkeys,” was a
critical hit last year. Even the people in Kathy Acker’s circle – innovative
writers published in little downtown magazines such as Bomb, Between C & D and
Top Stories – seem about to move into the mainstream.

The glitzy image of New York as a club-filled amusement park is not pure
hype, though, any more than it is the simple truth. Look at the video Tama
Janowitz made. Billed as ”the first literary video, it was a brief commercial
for ”Slaves of New York” that appeared on cable television last fall. Tama,
with her antique-shop, disheveled, early-Madonna look, is seen strutting down
the street, dining with Andy Warhol and the rock star Debbie Harry, sitting in a
pink crinoline skirt at a desk in the tiny Horatio Street studio apartment where
she then lived. A voice-over that brings to mind ”Life Styles of the Rich and
Famous” entices viewers to read about: ”New York’s art scene! The color! The
characters! The relationships!” Is this Tama Janowitz’s life?

”Put it this way, I don’t wake up in the morning and put on a tutu and have
makeup artists come over while I’m sitting there typing. Real life might be one
day of me sitting there typing and just making some horrible dinner and then
watching TV, and the next night might be the night I go to dinner with Andy,”
she said a few months before the pop artist’s death.

It takes a certain skewed perspective to be that blase about dinner with Andy
Warhol. Celebrity aside, Janowitz has been writing for years; her first novel,
”American Dad,” was published in 1981, and it will be reissued in June. But
she didn’t find her best subject until she started showing up at gallery
openings and clubs, hanging around with Interview magazine friends. Suddenly,
her social life gave her something to write about.

Authors such as Janowitz and McInerney are following the ancient practice of
writing about their own social circles. But in a complicated twist, they have
also helped create and perpetuate the artsy-club scene their books depict.
McInerney says of ”Bright Lights”: ”It was a private version of New York, but
it becomes a little more real the more it’s consumed. Though the events were
more fictional than factual, the milieu was certainly real. I’ll do a reading
someplace like Iowa City, and people will come up to me and say, ‘You made
that up, didn’t you? People don’t really live like that.’ There are certainly
elements of satire and exaggeration in ‘Bright Lights,’ but I took no great
liberties with the way people live. Now the scene has become more
self-conscious. The club scene was nascent when I was writing about it, it was
underground. It’s hard for anything to be underground now. If something below
14th Street pops up on Monday, by Tuesday it’s in the papers. I can’t be
un-self-conscious about things that, fortunately, I was un-self-conscious about
then.”

In those un-self-conscious days, only a few years back, Jay McInerney, Gary
Fisketjon and Morgan Entrekin were just three aspiring literary types, working
at editorial jobs and playing at what turned out to be the research for ”Bright
Lights.” Now, the McInerney-Fisketjon friendship stands as the editor-writer
myth of our time. Numerous newspaper and magazine articles tell of how
Fisketjon, then a Random House editor, began a new, now much-imitated paperback
series called Vintage Contemporaries, the original ”yuppiebacks,” launching it
with a group of novels that included his old college friend’s ”Bright Lights,
Big City.” Meanwhile, Morgan Entrekin, then an editor at Simon & Schuster, was
helping to define the genre of hip-novels-by-bright-kids, by acquiring Bret
Easton Ellis’s ”Less Than Zero.” Now all three are at Atlantic Monthy Press -
McInerney’s new publisher, where Fisketjon is editorial director and Entrekin
has his own imprint. ”We are a sort of galaxy of our own,” says McInerney of
the friendship.

Entrekin and Fisketjon are better known around town than some of their
authors. Few writers would be able to tell the story they both do – about going
to Nell’s, this year’s most exclusive restaurant, days before it became chic.
There was a party to celebrate Thomas McGuane’s book ”To Skin a Cat.”
Fisketjon says, ”Susan Minot, Tim O’Brien, Ray Carver, Tess Gallagher were
there, and a group of publishers. So, after the party, a bunch of us jumped
outside and flagged the next available car, which happened to be a limo – the
price was right – to take us down to Nell’s. There must have been 50 people
there. It was great, sort of like a huge, rich person’s living room, and done
with some taste. Across the room Robert Stone [the novelist] was having drinks
with somebody from Artforum. So the two parties merged. Now, nobody can get into
Nell’s.” To Fisketjon, this is a story about how a casual evening with friends
turned into a press agent’s extravaganza. ”That’s a wonderful story, but it’s
the exception that proves the rule,” he says.

To Entrekin, it proves there are no real literary salons. ”I thought that
night Nell’s might be able to turn into a kind of literary salon; it was
low-keyed,” he says. ”But the next time I went, it was full of the kind of
people who don’t work for a living, who really do nothing but go to clubs all
the time.”

Either way, the anecdote reveals how their corner of the literary world
intersects with a flashier social scene. And, of course, they still go to
Nell’s. In this dizzy, overlapping world, Tama Janowitz also showed up at
Nell’s early on. Yet Janowitz has been published in the staid New Yorker and in
the downtown journals Bomb, Between C & D and Top Stories. Chameleonlike, she
projects both fast-track fame and downtown artiness, fitting everywhere and
nowhere at once. ”In high school,” she says, ”there were these cliques – the
cheerleaders, the greasers, the ones with the motorcycles in the parking lot,
the hippies smoking marijuana – all these little circles. I remember my mother
telling me, ‘You’re not going to fit into any clique now, but in real life there
aren’t any cliques.’ But the truth is that in real life, especially in New York,
there are cliques. There are all these little villages.”

Janowitz is not the only one to notice literary New York’s village mentality.
Mona Simpson is a Paris Review editor whose impeccable literary connections
include the Review’s editor, George Plimpton, and her former teacher Elizabeth
Hardwick. She compares the New York literary scene to George Eliot’s Victorian
community. ”It’s like ‘Middlemarch,’ like you’ve entered a 19th-century
novel,” she says. ”I remember running into David Leavitt and Susan Minot at
an Alice Munro reading. It was a rainy, miserable night and none of us wanted to
be out, but we all turned up at this reading by one of our favorite writers. It
gives you a sense of life as plot, having a large acquaintanceship. You catch
up with people you haven’t seen in a year, so someone will have had a baby or
moved into a new apartment. You don’t see the texture as much. But everyone in
the room will have read Proust.”

Of course, most literary New Yorkers, like most Middlemarchers, see each
other a lot more than once a year, and they exist in a web of relationships as
tangled as any a town gossip could hope for. Charted, the connections might
resemble a Faulknerian geneology; listed, they look like the stuff of a good
soap opera. While in graduate school at Columbia, for instance, Mona Simpson met
Amy Hempel, Susan Minot and Nancy Lemann (the 31-year-old author of the novel
”Lives of the Saints”). Susan and Nancy first knew each other at Brown
University, where Gary Glickman later shared an apartment with Meg Wolitzer,
who eventually introduced him to David Leavitt, with whom Gary now lives in
East Hampton. David and Gary and Meg are good friends with Amy, and they know
Susan and Mona and Nancy. And recently Meg, who is teaching this year at
Skidmore College in Saratoga, N.Y., met Jay, who was spending some time nearby
at Yaddo, the writers’ colony. Jay, who blurbed Mona’s book, also knows Susan,
who was introduced to her publisher by Morgan Entrekin, whom she knew around
town. ”A literary circle suggests some coherence, some common goals,” says
Leavitt. ”This is more like a game of Lego, where you know someone who knows
someone else, who knows someone else.”

At its best, this small-town atmosphere serves a useful purpose. ”New York
is a hopper of conversation about books, and a lot of literary gossip,” says
Meg Wolitzer. ”When you open the Times Book Review on Sunday there’s almost
always the name of somebody you know. It makes you feel you have a world of
writers. Because writers aren’t like actors, who work together, we wish for that
community, so we try to create it.”

But, as Gordon Lish admits, this is no utopian community. Lish is an editor
at Knopf who also edits a new literary journal, The Quarterly. Many of the
writers who have passed through his notoriously competetive workshops at
Columbia University, in which they are required to bare their souls and have the
results set up against each other, have remained close friends. And many have
been published by Gordon Lish. ”Having endured combat together,” he says
facetiously, holds people together. He also observes, ”There is a community
that provides shared experience for work, but there is a price to be paid in the
distracting effects of envy, of the comparisons in terms of small successes.
When the frame of competition is aimed at the right models – at the excellence
of the composition of sentences – something quite wonderful can happen. If
attention is paid to advances or who is getting published, or to statements made
by some other writer over beer one day, it can be pernicious.”

Competition comes easily because literary New York is a microcosm of the
homogeneous yuppie middle class, where women have made faster gains than blacks
and there seems to be a disproportionate number of Ivy Leaguers. It can become
claustrophobic. Nancy Lemann spends part of the year in her native New Orleans.
”Writers need a certain amount of real life around them,” she says. ”You
can’t just chronicle other writers hanging around in nightclubs. New Orleans is
my connection to everything real and good and true. There are families and
gardens; people have cast in their lots there.”

Many other authors also value the fresh perspectives available outside the
city. ”New York is a kind of Wonderland,” says McInerney. ”You start to take
the laws of Manhattan as the laws of nature, when nothing could be farther from
the truth.” Often, they head out of the city merely to get a respite from its
social demands. That’s one reason why Tama Janowitz is at Princeton; why
McInerney admits he must leave New York in order not to go out every night; why
David Leavitt moved to Long Island from Manhattan. ”I couldn’t work there
anymore,” says Leavitt. ”It was getting to be overwhelming – not just the
noise and traffic, but the distractions of the literary life, of knowing
everything about every book everyone is publishing. On any gven night there’s a
publishing party or a reading. And,” he adds, ”I got sick of living in one
room.”

As one of many writers who has not graduated to a full-sized apartment, Meg
Wolitzer says, ”We go out to eat all the time because it’s necessary to leave
our cubbyhole apartments. In New York, it’s so distracting – if I want to wander
through rooms I have to go outside. That’s why so many writers go to writers’
colonies; none of us in the city has an ideal writing workspace.”

If there is an exception to the homogeneity of literary New York, it would
seem to be Kathy Acker’s downtown crowd. Although David Leavitt’s
psychological realism and homosexual themes could never be confused with Jay
McInerney’s smooth irony and hip people, and while McInerney’s discontented
characters are weightier than Janowitz’s, these writers are all traditional,
mainstream stylists. But Acker, with her black crew cut, gold front tooth, rose
tattoo on her arm and eight earrings in her left ear, writes as untraditionally
as she looks. Her latest novel, ”Don Quixote,” is a typical Acker fiction, a
fragmented narrative that usurps and reinvents a classic, turning Don Quixote
into a woman traumatized by an abortion.

Last fall, dozens of Acker’s friends climbed rickety stairs to a Hudson
Street apartment to celebrate the publication of ”Don Quixote.” There was a
campy air of parody in the room – a female bartender, with masses of orange-red
hair, was dressed in a French maid’s costume; men wore eyeliner; almost everyone
wore black. They seemed to be the irreverent heirs of Jack Kerouac, updating a
scene from the 50’s. Only when old friends hugged Acker and welcomed her back
did it became clear that this was not a ritual gathering of the 80’s
avant-garde, but a homecoming. ”I couldn’t afford to live in New York,” Acker
says of her move to London, where her work is better known. ”But I miss my
friends, so I’m thinking of looking for a teaching job so I can come back.”

The downtown writers who welcomed Acker home walk, talk and look like a
genuine literary circle, one that includes some of the most innovative voices on
the scene – author-editors in their mid to late 30’s, like Betsy Sussler, and
Craig Gholson of Bomb magazine, Anne Turyn of Top Stories, Catherine Texier and
Joel Rose, of Between C & D. But many of them regard the late 70’s as their
glory days, when artists and writers and filmmakers ran into each other at the
now-closed Mudd Club, before the dispersing effects of success and encroaching
middle age had set in. The movement among Kathy Acker’s friends now is not out
of town but – like it or not – toward the establishment.

Just as several years ago the downtown art scene was discovered by mainstream
art dealers, the press and the public, many of the authors whose fiction has
appeared in Bomb or Between C & D are now breaking through to major publishers,
even though, like Acker’s, their work has a sharper edge than the realism of
most of the younger, better-known writers – being fragmented, open-ended, more
forthright in its language and in its depiction of sex and drugs. Grove press
is even planning to bring out Kathy Acker’s collected works.

Betsy Sussler was a writer and actress, before she started Bomb in 1981, and
began publishing fiction by a lot of the Mudd Club crowd. In those days, she
says, ”you felt like you weren’t alone. There were gallery openings, conceptual
artists, filmmakers, theater people. There was an art community and a lot of
untraditional narrative.”

Blending artwork with poetry and fiction, Bomb has developed over the years
into a polished, sophisticated magazine, where the work of new artists stands
beside interviews with better-known authors like Angela Carter and Martin Amis -
writers whose own sly, irreverent fiction would fit comfortably into the
magazine. And Bomb’s early contributors have flourished. In addition to Acker’s
”Don Quixote,” the magazine excerpted ”Haunted House,” a novel by Lynne
Tillman – a filmmaker and former Mudd Club devotee – which was recently
published by Simon & Schuster’s Poseidon Press; Poseidon will also bring out
”Blood and Water and Other Tales” by Patrick McGrath, a contributing editor of
both Bomb and Between C & D. ”It was important to have parts of ‘Haunted
Houses’ published in Bomb,” says Tillman. ”If you’re living in New York, you
have to be aware of what the city holds. Otherwise, you could be in Des Moines
thinking The New Yorker is the only place to send your stories.”

The irony is that as the downtown authors become more successful, they also
become more dispersed. Perhaps that’s simply the nature of literary circles – by
the time you can point to them, they’ve already dispersed. But the readings that
used to take place every week are rare these days. There is more solitary work
finishing a novel, less hanging out with friends while groping to find a
literary voice. And ”in the late 70’s, loft spaces were enormous and cheap,”
Lynne Tillman says. ”Now people have started moving into smaller spaces, and
we’re five years older. There’s more socializing in restaurants, meeting for
dinner and keeping in touch on the phone.” Even though the social life has died
down, says Betsy Sussler, ”We’ve spent 10 years building up this support group.
In your heart you feel like a group, but socially, no.”

Catherine Texier and Joel Rose’s apartment is a perfect example of how
mainstream meets downtown, high-tech meets hard-edged fiction. In a rapidly
improving block on East Seventh Street, they have a large, two-story apartment,
filled with sunlight, the drawings of their 6-year-old daughter and the word
processor on which they create Between C & D. Texier, a Paris native who has
worked as a journalist in Montreal and New York, looks and sounds like a stylish
young mom -resembling not at all the emotionally ragged heroine of her
extraordinary novel ”Love Me Tender.” An explicit look at sex and survival on
the Lower East Side, the novel is full of powerful, sensuous language; the
central character is a sexually voracious go-go dancer whose lovers include a
kindly drug dealer and a sadistic artist. The novel will appear in June as a
paperback original in the mainstream Penguin Contemporary American Fiction
series.

But Rose and Texier began the magazine – it is actually a computer printout,
a string of pages complete with sprockets on the sides, sold in a zip-lock bag -
three years ago because they felt that the world of university-published
journals was closed to them. In fact, Texier recalls that the Paris Review
turned down one of her stories. ”They said it didn’t feel like a finished
story, it was fragmented, there was a sense of not being closed – which I
wanted,” she says. Rose went through the Columbia writing program but hated the
experience – it was all about making contacts and getting ahead in your career,
he says, not about writing. Nonetheless, he has worked as a television script
doctor for ”Kojack” and ” Miami Vice,” and has an grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts to complete his novel, which is being looked at by
mainstream publishers.

For all their their irony in the face of the mainstream, some downtown
writers seem to have a petty case of McInerney-envy. It is a fact, if not an
affectation, that many of them stumble as they try to pronounce his name – a
problem not common in any other segment of the publishing world. ”What’s he
going to do now, write his great Ann Arbor novel?” asks one.

As it happens, McInerney’s new novel is set in New York, which, with all its
distractions, remains the metaphorical wellspring for young writers. Perhaps
it’s even a literal wellspring. ”New York is built over a mineral spring, which
in legend you’re not supposed to do,” says Cookie Mueller, the the Details
magazine columnist and actress who also writes fiction. ”Living over water
makes people crazy. It gives them too much energy.” That might explain the
frenetic literary crosshatchings, the scramble that is not, after all, about the
isolated act of writing, but about the wildly different, communal acts of
friendship and fame.

At a Christmas party Harper’s magazine gave at the Acme Bar & Grill – a place
so down and dirty it’s cool -the room was full of junior editors and struggling
freelance writers whose names are better known to each other than to the public.
As one of them said, ”I have friends who are writers. If 50 years from now it
turns out that we’re all famous, we’ll have been a literary circle. If not,
we’ll have been a group of friends who were writers.”

Kate Lee’s blogroll will hit stores this fall. These books will be remaindered nearly instantaneously. Daniel Radosh and Kate Lee will be driven from town to the cheers of child prostitutes and editorial assistants everywhere, as publishers discover what Kevin Smokler already know – blogs don’t sell books.

And then fall 2006 …the second tier blog books … books picked up by editors tasked with finding anything with the word “blog” in it. Blogs by people who write:

“I’d rather write a commercial, likeable book along the lines of The Devil Wears Prada than a masterpiece like A Confederacy of Dunces. Think about it; John Kennedy Toole killed himself before his book ever sold, yet Lauren Weisberger is likely chillin’ on a Hawaiian island drinking coconut rum cocktails and counting her money.”

This will be too much for readers. In the future children will endure learning suppositories because some suburban dumb-fuck with a blog published her book and destroyed the business.

Fat Cat