CAMPUS CORRESPONDENCE : For Twentysomethings, Life Centers on Surviving, Not Snorting Coke

Brett Easton Ellis’ novel about a super-epicurean young man who terrorizes women and homeless people is as far-fetched as the story of an entire generation that parties to a beat so hard the prodigal white lines become crooked.

Norman Mailer may have set the story straight on Ellis’ terroristic “American Psycho” when, in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, he decried its murderous character for having no motive--no inner logic. The problem is that Ellis and others are also depicting the entire Twentysomething generation as an aimless character with no motive.

To its naysayers, the generation is selfish, celebratory, morally corrupt; but to anyone who has seen the grass-roots view, it is simply a group with a will to survive. If the generation seems detached and apathetic, it is because its members resent the harsh world in which they grew up.

Ellis, who has become somewhat of a generational spokesman, is responsible not only for a flawed character in “American Psycho,” but for a flawed depiction of America’s youth in his novels, including “Less Than Zero,” and in an article he wrote, “The Twentysomethings: Adrift in a Pop Culture.”

He says ours is a generation confused by mass media, mass commercialism and a mass of different ideologies. These befogged youth are attracted to expensive foreign labels, powdered drugs and cars known only by acronyms or numbers, or so the stereotype goes.

But why? Ellis would have us believe it’s money alone that directs these superfluous lives. But that is an insufficient explanation because his central thesis is wrong.

The entertainment media, eager to peg any group with a time-saving stereotype, have followed Ellis into this apathetic suburban, white world where money ebbs and drugs flow. Asians, blacks and Latinos are, predictably, the fringe dealers, gang members and struggling young parents.

The measuring stick is the 1960s counterculture: Apathy is bad and protest is good.

Those who would defend Ellis’ vision argue that Twentysomethings have had no Vietnam to rally around, no lack of civil-rights laws to decry and, thus, no spark.

In fiction the generation--as portrayed by Ellis--has had an overdose on the bull-market 1980s good life. For Ellis, the decade’s young adults relived the 1920s, only with a little cocaine and modern technology sprinkled in.

The Gulf War challenged this notion, although some observers probably emerged befuddled over the nightly spectacle of Twentysomethings serving on the front-lines and Twentysomethings on both sides of the line in the war debate at home. What happened to all the white lines?

The war exposed as poorly aimed the characterizations that were fired at the Twentysomethings. The generation is neither spineless, nor wholly suburban, nor filthy rich. So many of the soldiers, as well as the protesters on television, were the sons and daughters of mechanics and farmers.

Their generation is not Cosby, and it is not Less Than Zero. It is one of the most diverse adult populations this country has ever seen.

But if critics insist on the nutshell synopsis, this is it: The generation’s coherence comes from its will to survive, at all socioeconomic levels. Ellis portrays the generation as too rich and too white.

It is one of the first generations to experience widespread lack of parenting, for whatever reason. Many--even the rich--were latchkey children, victims of divorce and casualties of beatings and rape.

This is what drives a segment of the generation to powder over the memories, to tint the windows of their Japanese sports cars, to party it up. But the instincts that fuel hedonism for the real fringe--the wealthy--fueled survivalism in the thousands of Anglos, Asians, blacks and Latinos who stormed Kuwait and raised banners of dissent and support on American turf.

Twentysomethings have a street-savvy garnered from a sometimes-traumatic youth. Less idealistic and more realistic than the counterculture, today’s youth know when to lie low and when to stand up and fight.

During the ‘80s, they were acquiescent. During the Gulf War, many fought. And now the naysayers who pegged the generation as apathetic are the ones who are flawed characters.