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Review
has been edited by David Leavitt. Called “These Young People Today,” it has some stuff in the present tense, of course. After all,it’s today. So I read the collection as part of my researches. Reading it is like walking through a cemetery before they’ve put in any graves.
    Some say the movies are to blame, if blame there be. But movies are at best a once-a-week thing, and we all went when we were kids, and ate licorice gummies from a sack and shouted early warnings at Errol Flynn; but when we went to write, we did as the painters did when photos first complexed the scene: we carefully avoided imitating them. (I go too far: there are significant exceptions, John Dos Passos among them, but the students will not have read him; they will read Doctorow instead.) Writers were released from popularity (in a commercial culture, no small thing); they were freed from the tyranny of story and all the trappings of the tale, if they chose to throw them off. Movies may melt the mind down, and they certainly lured many a talent onto the scotchy rocks with their money; however, there was no particular fondness for the present tense until television (and now the VCR) upped our exposure to pictures from two hours a week to six or ten a day, and magazines lay down in a litter of images as though their pages had been blown about in the street.
    This fondness for the present tense … well, what could be expected from the teenybop scream-jean population: that’s what is usually said. Aren’t they all—the young—into drugs and thugs, into strobes and films (as that sexist preposition puts it)? Aren’t they into video and vibes and cars that go varoom, as well as words like “varoom” from their favorite cartoon balloons? And aren’t they into skimpy swimmies and other visuals? And don’t they wear brand names on their tops, bottoms, and bumpers, as if they had themselves been manufactured or, like a billboard, rented out? They are definitely not into vocabulary or the pleasures of verbalization; they only like ideas after they have been drawn, and one of their ideas, the idea of history, is exclusively concerned with the passing of fads and crazes, and the instantaneous illumination or extinction of stars.
    We should wonder, rather, at the return of the tough guy in thisminimalist guise, the guy of few words, of laconic eyes and ears, with a heart of candy, although it is a sweet by this time both stale and hard, cynical in a sentimental sense, weary from the word “go” and half gone, who doesn’t defile his feelings with ideas or talk them to destruction. His silences, therefore, are strong. His enemies are no longer red Indians or fierce bulls, nor does he go to war in exotic landscapes. Now his enemies are simply daily life and women. At the same time that we note his triumphant return (as part of a widespread political phenomenon), we should count the number of women, more foul-mouthed and macho than Mailer, who, though sweetly released like pigeons from their cages, have decided to fly like eagles and feed on mice.
    The same current that carries Clark Gable and Gary Cooper past Sam Spade and Black Mask dick flicks into our own gun-cocked, blood-spill movies continues through minimalism into cyberpunk and other fashionable celebrations of street life, trash talk, and pop mechanics, until it puddles now in the technofuck film.
    The style of these terse, present-tense tales, then, is soft tough. They are stories shorn, not only of adjectives and adverbs, but of words themselves, almost as if their authors didn’t know any. Some warriors arm themselves for battle, but these warriors, like wrestlers, strip. They write in strips, too. Sentences are invariably short, declarative, and as factual as a string of fish. Images are out. It is fraudulent to poeticize. I cannot compare myself to my fridge as I mop. Kept simple, quick, direct, like a punch, the sentences avoid subordination, qualification, subtlety.