Less than Zero

Ah, the ‘80s. Has this century spawned a more tedious, vapid and superficial sensibility, especially among urban and professional people of means and among the young most of all? The decade’s closest parallel in affluence, the 1920s, had to recommend it at least the uncorseting of women and the recrudescence of a distinctly American literary voice. The ‘80s, by contrast, bequeathed a culture of consumption, increased worship at the altar of fame, highly dubious pop music, a thick fog of anomie and a shelf of novels chronicling all of the above in clipped, anemic prose locked in a perpetual, and often airless, present tense.

Of course this summary, like all summaries, wants nuancing. It seems both curmudgeonly and narrow-minded to suggest that 10 years of experience are incapable of supplying a fertile background for thoughtful novels. The larger question is when, and by whom, the decade might best be revisited fictionally. Perspective is the key factor: One kind of book is written in the field, where the writer’s samples--the habits, behaviors, tastes, and textures of the time, his time--are collected almost intuitively and without much of an eye to how they will weather or date. A different kind of novel entirely is written back in the lab, after some years have passed and first a natural, then a more deliberate sifting through of these same samples has taken place.

At initial glance, “Bad Vibes,” a first novel by Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet, would seem excellently situated to approach the ‘80s from a new and vigorous slant. Although the book was originally published in Chile in 1991, it was still written at a solid remove from the time in which it is set, a week in early September of 1980. And although Fuguet’s central characters are young, urban, rich and infatuated with all things North American, neither they nor the writer are North American, after all. These facts should, ideally, place Fuguet at a provocative angle from which to observe the cultural legacy of the United States and the way Chile both resembled and differed from its flashy northern neighbor during this period. Yet “Bad Vibes” is a novel so much of the 1980s that it might as well have been written smack in the middle of it, and this is not always to its advantage.

If Fuguet did not set out to look back on the ‘80s but instead preferred to immerse himself in them, what then did he hope to find there? An environment, clearly, of privilege, excess and spiritual torpor, against which he sets the weeklong descent of his 17-year-old protagonist and first-person narrator, Matias Vicun~a. Matias is among the “chosen ones,” a group of rich Santiago teenagers who, as the novel opens, are concluding a weeklong furlough to a Brazilian beach. They are returning to Chile just as a referendum is being held to decide whether President Augusto Pinochet’s new constitution will be ratified, and there is a disturbed air in the city.

Although the Pinochet dictatorship imbues the novel with a certain flavor of menace, it has a fairly benign effect on the behavior of Matias and his gang. These kids are hampered only by a strictly enforced curfew and their own propensity for boredom, “bored” and “boring” being words Matias uses to describe himself and his friends more than a dozen times. In every other sense, these young people are free to drink, smoke pot, snort cocaine and have frequent uncommitted sex. They listen to Kiss and Pink Floyd, venerate movies like “American Gigolo” and “Mad Max” and dress in Lee’s, Top-Siders and Ray-Bans, never just jeans, tennis shoes or dark glasses. Sound familiar? The ghosts--the spirits, rather--of early Jay Mclnerney and Tama Janowitz hover so close that one almost expects the writers to put in a guest appearance.

Instead, we are given Fitzgerald and Salinger, or at least their more notable creations. Matias is likened to Gatsby by Flora, his Spanish teacher, and he not only calls Holden Caulfield “my new best friend, my twin,” he registers his name at a hotel and buys a (red) hunting hat on the Caulfield model. This is a clumsy way to draw character, not because of the narrator’s understandable affection for Gatsby and Caulfield but because the writer turns them into signals that are consumed the same way Matias consumes his Ray-Bans and his Lee’s. None of this helps us penetrate any further into the mystery of his spiritual crisis.

Matias is a troubled young man. He lies without feeling any remorse; he is selfish and self-absorbed; he is embarrassed by the show of emotion. Yet he is not without a more sober, probing side. He feels a continuing connection to Antonia, his ex-girlfriend, who is not impressed by his cocky, spoiled kid’s charm and calls him on his egocentrism and superficiality. While Matias rejects her severe but accurate assessment, he continues to seek her out, both in person and as an internalized voice contrapuntal to his own, which suggests that he is not wholly satisfied by his shiftless, shapeless days and nights. Another figure who challenges Matias is Flora, his teacher, whose literary lectures Matias is alone among his friends in grasping; this too suggests that there is another Matias beneath the layabout who drifts through the novel.

Drifts, indeed: “Bad Vibes” is not a suspensefully told story. It could be argued that the book’s aimless plot accurately mirrors Matias’s lethargy, but it’s one thing to depict lethargy and quite another to let it stain the entire narrative fabric. As Matias wanders through his week, he does at least expose the reader to a cross-section of Santiago life. He attends family parties, frequents bars and clubs with his friends, participates in his nephew’s baptism, visits the family apartment at the beach, returns to school and, after fighting with his parents, eventually runs away from home and checks into a downtown hotel pseudonymously masked as his good friend Holden.

There a few moments where the story breaks through the haze of ennui and provides hints as to why Matias may have evolved into the kind of person he is. Early on, we learn that Matias’ handsome father likes to talk about sex with his son and is always trying to see him naked. In this pre-”Kiss,” almost willfully un-Freudian milieu, his father’s behavior does not seem overly alarming to the narrator, who describes him as a “little boy inside, unsure of himself, vulnerable.” Near the end of the book, when Matias’ father finds him after he’s run away, he suggests that the pair “go wild” together, and they share booze, cocaine, women and a few tears. The male-bonding escape is meant to, and does, effect a reconciliation between the senior and the junior Vicun~a. It also leaves the reader feeling that finally, a little light has been trained on Matias’ curiously shuttered psyche.

Also helpful in this regard is Matias’ suppressed Jewish identity. Near the beginning of the novel, Matias is surprised by his visceral reaction to a friend’s interest in swastikas and images of concentration camps. The moment is just dropped into the story, but it lingers in the reader’s mind. Later, at his nephew’s baptism, Matias reveals that his mother and her family have been passing as Catholic for two generations, even going so far as to make anti-Semitic remarks of their own. Matias tells us that since discovering the truth about his origins, his life has felt “neither here or there, not inside, not out. I’m the only one who knows my secret, a secret that would mortify most people, but fills me with pride.”

Two carefully described and very different hats appear in “Bad Vibes.” One, as mentioned, mimics Holden Caulfield’s famous hunting cap and leads Fuguet into the territory of the trite. The other belongs to Matias’ Jewish grandfather, Tata Ivan. It was made in Budapest in the 1920s, and Matias’ grandfather used to wear it to help him pick up girls. Matias steals the hat from him at his 80th birthday party. He takes it on his trip to Brazil, loans it to Antonia and never mentions it again. This is a shame. Fuguet should have allowed Matias to wear this fabled Hungarian calan~e throughout his anxious week. It would have provided Matias with much better, and far more interesting, protection from all those bad vibes.