FICTION

THE FRUIT COCKTAIL DIARIES by Brian Carmody and Gretchen Hayduk (St. Martin’s; $18.95; 192 pp.). The publisher of “The Fruit Cocktail Diaries” kindly sends along with review copies a brief article from Interview in which Brian Carmody and Gretchen Hayduk are described as best friends “hoping to find a publisher for their book.” They did, thanks to the publicity no doubt, and so we now have a novel that’s been published less for its intrinsic qualities than its marketability to a specific audience, namely Generation X. The novel presents us with two twentysomething waiters in Manhattan--she’s straight, romantic, and confused; he’s gay, hard-bitten, and confused--who have set down their thoughts, independently, in identical hard-bound journals which an unknown someone has come across in an East Village street market. “The Fruit Cocktail Diaries” is a quick, undemanding read, and that’s fitting, for it reflects the protagonists’ self-admittedly shallow existence; she realizes her “great new life” consists of little more than “getting sloppy-drunk every night, with friends I’m not even sure I like,” and he acidly resigns himself to sleeping only with “that special someone whom I will have no intention of ever seeing or speaking to again.” Talent is at work here, but it’s equally clear that Carmody and Hayduk are destined to be swallowed up by the media machine and promoted as spokespeople for their generation rather than encouraged to develop their embryonic literary skills. Worse, that’s probably exactly what they want, for if Gen X has come to understand anything about U.S. culture, it’s that glib and easy will always beat out complex and challenging.