Lagniappe

It was poet Gregory Corso who wrote

of Jack Kerouac and the other Beats that it

was "not so much our finding America as it was America finding its voice in us..." And before Kerouac, the Fifties and the Beats, Fitzgerald of the Twenties found himself the voice of a "Lost" generation. But for generations more recent, the voice of the disenfranchised has come through the words of the cocaine authors of the Eighties, Jay McInerney with his novel Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis with Less Than Zero. It is the middle of the Nineties, and author Douglas Coupland's Generation X phrase is becoming passé; authors are lining up, and in some cases dressing up in the jackets of the ones they are trying to emulate, and even rip off.

A journal is found at a flea market held on St. Marks Place in New York City, a street once described by Allen Ginsberg as "a culture church." The book is bound in a "crazy fruit cover." A week later, in the same spot, on the same corner, another journal is found, the book's jacket covered in the same fruit design. And so the scene is set for Fruit Cocktail Diaries by Brian Carmody and Gretchen Hayduk (St. Martin's Press, $15.95 hard). A tale of the lives of two people, both living in New York, told in alternating chapters. Two diaries that co-exist without the knowledge of the other until...

The unnamed female character finds herself bored with her promising advertising career in Ohio and decides to pack up her life in search of adventure in New York City. The woman finds double shifts and a paycheck working in a restaurant. It is a world that provides a place for Jillian, a waitress who goes from nymph to nun; J.C., her gay co-worker who takes it upon himself to expose the näive little miss to the sins of the city; and Harold, a homeless man she befriends after a random phone call in the middle of the night.

The alternating chapters, written in two different text styles, follow the life of a gay waiter who later becomes a cook. He has spent the last five years of his life "getting laid and getting nowhere" and having dreamt of coming to New York since the Seventies to do "drugs in the bathroom (of Studio 54) with Calvin Klein." What follows is a transcript of failed relationships, suicide threats, and anonymous sex.

Many writers, including Bret Easton Ellis with his first novel, Rules of Attraction, have attempted to publish novels dressed up as journals. The problem, unfortunately, is that daily entries tend to be trivial and frequently boring. Carmody and Hayduk neatly avoid this problem and produce a short but poignant piece of fiction.

Portland and New York are the two chapter titles, used more times than once, of Bongwater (Grove Books, $17 paper) by Michael Hornburg. David, a misunderstood filmmaker, travels around by skateboard, and finds himself homeless after a former girlfriend has burned down his apartment and fled to New York. Courtney, the former love in David's life (and as coincidence would have it, Michael Hornburg's ex-girlfriend's name is Courtney Love), heads for the Big Apple to live with Tommy, a crazed musician who is fighting "a dementia unknown to the common man." David is left in Portland to find love with Jennifer, Courtney's best friend, and Mary, a stripper on a power trip.

In New York, Courtney finds a ruthless world too harsh for even her street-wise self. She wakes up in the back of a delivery truck to find "her pants were curled around her ankles, her shoes still on, her T-shirt moist from sweat and vomit. She felt patches of sticky sperm on her upper thigh and started to cry."

What Hornburg does, that writers like McInerney do so well, is to write with insight about the hip club scene, a scene full of drugs, erotica, drag queens, and guest lists. Hornburg succeeds in choosing a story to tell, but it's his style of writing that lacks substance - the dilated pupils and sexual energy of an all-night rave on ecstasy are missing. One wonders if Hornburg is cashing in on Miss Love, an artist who, herself, spent many years denying that she has ridden the coattails of others.

- Jeremy Reed

Heart Songs and Other Stories by E. Annie

Proulx (Simon & Schuster, $10 paper)is a poignant anthology, well-crafted tales of strangers trying to fit in. Some convince themselves of their honorable intentions, but most are clearly opportunists, preying on the countryside as they chuckle snidely at the country folk and turn their culture into sport. Proulx writes about an America fast becoming extinct, the self-sufficient small town with a factory or mill as its primary means of support, resisting in vain the looming shadow of the city. Her world is small-town New England, and she sides with the locals.

It is remarkable how well Proulx knows her subjects. The stories have a technically precise backdrop of hunting and trapping (in fact, her stories have been published in Gray's Sporting Journal), but it is her insight into human character that makes them so eloquent. To the interloper, the locals serve only as quaint caricatures, but the author understands them to be rich without money, smart without education, and closer to nature (i.e., god), all the while carrying along with their personal baggage a certain archetypal sadness of the inevitable: that someday they will be overtaken by progress, by time. But the strangers are kept at bay with the last bit of power these locals wield, which is in their wisdom and knowledge of the land; these are not the inhabitants of Grover's Corner.

Proulx is so thorough, her locations become characters in their own right. With language both provincial and alluring, the autumn New England landscapes breathe with yellowjackets, grouse, milkweed, butternuts, and wood sorrel. In the haunting "Stone City," the author uses the movements of a brown fox to represent decades of history through the lingering spirit of a rancorous family that once inhabited the farm on which the creature roams.

Her rich descriptions appear effortless. In "The Unclouded Day," Earl, an accountant from the city, hires the best shot in town to teach him to bird hunt. The simple matter of their first meeting is adorned by language, providing insight into their personalities and the recurring themes of the stories themselves."Earl oiled Santee with his voice... Santee gave each word its fair measure of weight...." Her facility with words is no secret; Proulx is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News, and her first novel Postcards won the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Aside from lyrical beauty, Proulx's tales do what all good stories should: pull readers into a world they might not otherwise visit but to which they'll undoubtedly want to return. Slow and easy, with a measured eeriness that keeps the pages turning, these stories are like a small-town day; nothing ever happens, yet everything does. - Jennifer Scoville