The hedonists. The provocateur. The phenom. The forgotten talent. In the decadent 1980s, the media shipped novelists Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Donna Tartt, and Jill Eisenstadt into a loose-knit group known as the "literary brat pack." One member would go on to win a Pulitzer; one would become better known for controversy than fiction; another would exemplify the excessive highs and very public lows of the decade; and another would slowly fade from view.
A generation of readers loved them. Critics largely despised them. And for a time, they were celebrated for their youth as much as their work. But they also helped change the course of American literature—and looked great doing it. "I think we made fiction fun again," says McInerney.
The lower you walked through Manhattan toward the Twin Towers at night, the darker it got. Cabs didn't like to go below 14th Street. Beyond the punks at CBGB's on the Bowery, the Mudd Club on White Street, or the Paradise Garage on King Street, it was hard to know who or what was lurking down the next block. But the glowing red sign at 145 West Broadway—"The Odeon" on one side, "Cafeteria" on the other—stuck out in the sea of black. Outside it was all bright neon sunshine. Inside, the lighting was perfect for all of the beautiful people.
On any given night in the early days of the Reagan years, the Odeon was bound to host a mix of characters: Saturday Night Live cast members, young Wall Street bulls, David Bowie, models galore. Often the young writer Tama Janowitz, fresh off the release of her first novel, American Dad, would head to the restaurant with her friend Andy Warhol. Warhol thought she was "kooky," but she fit in with his pretty young things and up-and-coming art world stars, like Jean-Michel Basquiat. People would order Chef Patrick Clark's steak frites, but the food would get cold while they mingled or took frequent trips downstairs to "the best place to do blow or get laid in Manhattan," as one regular recalled of the Odeon's tucked-away bathroom. Despite the noise, Janowitz, with her big hair and her thrift-store-chic-meets-Vampira look, paid attention to everything, all the gossip and stories, looking for inspiration.
Jay McInerney was 26 in 1981. He was an Odeon regular, alongside his friend Gary Fisketjon, a Random House editor he'd met when they were both in undergrad together at Williams College. McInerney had worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, before he started selling his short stories, but that job wasn't for him—or at least the magazine didn't think so. He went to the Odeon to pick up women, but it also featured prominently in his newest story, "It's Six A.M., Do You Know Where You Are?" which he'd just sold to The Paris Review. So it was also sort of like research.
A year later, that first short story would finally run and McInerney's career would start to fall into place. And a few years after that, the Christian Science Monitor's Hilary DeVries would call his debut Bright Lights, Big City "1984's trendiest novel." She'd place him and a few other "under-30 novelists" in the "literary brat pack": young writers who were rumored to spend more time in downtown bars and nightclubs partying until dawn instead of writing. Just like Hollywood at the time, which was in the middle of a youth movement—their "brat pack" corollary included Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, and Molly Ringwald—the literary world was, too. The term wasn't meant to stick to the writers, but it did, and for decades after, they would be tied to the label.
It was a great party for a few years. But like everything else in the 1980s, it had to crash sooner or later.
In the fall of 1982, Bennington College creative writing teacher Joe McGinniss—famed for being the youngest living writer to have a #1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller, at 26, for 1969's The Selling of the President 1968—called his friend Morgan Entrekin, then an editor at Simon & Schuster, with a proposal. "I have the most interesting student writer I've ever seen," McGinniss said, and added: "He's a freshman."
Entrekin was wary. People pitched him book ideas all the time; most were busts. And anyway, how could a college freshman have written something that good? But he bit, and what McGinniss gave Entrekin—a handful of journal entries from a young Los Angeles student named Bret Easton Ellis—would end up being better than nearly anything he'd seen in his career thus far. Entrekin recogniSed the same kind of generational chronicling in Ellis' work that made writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon the trippy literary voices of the '60s counterculture. The editor was barely a decade older than Ellis, but he could tell this was something different. And he knew it could sell.
Ellis had sent in the journal entries to Bennington—a pricey and small liberal arts college three hours north of Manhattan, a place where kids from monied families went if they didn't have the grades, or were too strange, to get into Ivies—as his entrance essay. He'd been working on them in high school, where, as "an increasingly aware gay kid," he says, he found an outlet through writing. The entries were a "combination of fact and fiction," he says; "a lot of family stuff, girlfriend stuff, boyfriend stuff." Observations of the young, bored and beautiful kids he knew from L.A., the ones who had fathers with big Hollywood jobs—making movies, or making money off them. Ellis' dad had a big job, too, in the real estate industry, but Ellis always felt like an outsider among his peers; his family didn't work in the local business.
At Bennington, Ellis found a mentor in McGinniss, along with a group of other students looking to make it as writers. By sophomore year, thanks to McGinniss and Entrekin's interest, Ellis was far ahead of his classmates. Finishing his "project" became an obsession. Around Thanksgiving of 1982, Ellis traveled down to Manhattan to meet with Entrekin to talk about his writing. Ellis' father had an apartment at the Carlyle, so he stayed there, Entrekin recalls. "He had mono or something—he was deathly ill. He just seemed really withdrawn." But the work spoke for itself: "The pages, to me, were amazing," says Entrekin. He found them fascinating enough that he sent excerpts to editor friends at Harper's and Rolling Stone to see if they'd be interested in publishing it. He never heard back.
Ellis kept writing through the winter break of '82—when he wasn't "taking speed and partying around Los Angeles," he says—taking notes of everything he saw and heard, all the messed-up kids telling wild stories at house parties. Any little bit could be included in his project. As Vermont started to thaw from the winter, his notes finally took the shape of a book. It was supposed to be fiction, but what it became—Less Than Zero, a novel about a college student going back home to Los Angeles from Christmas break—originated from Ellis' firsthand experiences that holiday season: high school kids doing coke, having sex, charging everything to their parents' credit cards, hanging out at the mall in their downtime, and feeling the loneliness of the city.
By the time Ellis finished his manuscript in 1983, McGinniss had introduced him to his agent, Sterling Lord, who had also represented Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. Lord called Entrekin about Ellis: "Do you remember this guy?" Of course Entrekin did, and he wasn't surprised that one of the industry's most notable agents was now representing Ellis. When Entrekin circulated the manuscript to the Simon & Schuster editorial board of mostly-older editors, one said, "If there's an audience for novels about cock-sucking, coke-snorting zombies, then by all means, let's let Morgan acquire this. But if we do, it's time for me to retire." They still let Entrekin buy it.
McGinniss didn't mentor only Ellis: his circle of students at Bennington also included Jill Eisenstadt, who'd ended up there because she was a great flute player. "Joe was just so encouraging," she says about her teacher. Quiet, almost shy, Eisenstadt paid close attention to what her other, more driven classmates were doing, like Ellis and Donna Tartt, who had transferred from the University of Mississippi, near her hometown of Greenwood, MS. Like Ellis, Tartt stood out among all the other students. "There was a lot of awful writing at Bennington," Eisenstadt would recall years later, "but Donna's stories were very sophisticated, very mysterious, very structurally sound. She was the only person I knew who'd studied Greek and Latin, who'd read all of Proust." Tartt looked and sounded like something by Charles Dickens or Flannery O'Connor, with penetrating, haunted green eyes and a noticeable Southern accent. She was working on a manuscript, too, but wouldn't complete it—the book that would become the beloved Dionysian reverse murder mystery The Secret History—for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, everyone on campus knew about Ellis' book deal, and he wasn't even old enough to buy booze. As his debut's publication date drew closer, he went down to New York more frequently. In April of 1984, he participated in a NYU panel moderated by his editor Robert Asahina (Entrekin left Simon & Schuster right after acquiring the book); Jay McInerney was there, too. By all accounts, the then-untested Ellis sounded smart and poised sitting alongside more established writers, and McInerney, the young literary star, was curious about the nine-years-younger Ellis. He'd read an advanced copy of Less Than Zero and could recogniSe a kinship between them; Entrekin was trying to push Ellis' manuscript as a West Coast version of Bright Lights. They'd met once before, when McInerney booked the pair a table at Indochine, the French-Vietnamese hotspot just a few blocks from Washington Square Park.
McInerney was still riding high off the bestselling success of his debut. The week Bright Lights, Big City was released, in August of 1984, the number one book on the New York Times bestseller list, Helen Hooven Santmyer's ...And Ladies of the Club, was called "relentlessly dull" by one of the newspaper's leading critics. "Literary fiction was in the doldrums," McInerney recalls. Things were looking good for McInerney. At 30 he was "dusted with cocaine, disco glitter and the faint promise of a literary future," wrote one magazine profile. His second novel, Ransom, came out in the fall of '85, and he and his second wife, Merry, whom he'd met at Syracuse University, where McInerney had been lured to get his Master of Fine Arts by the writer Raymond Carver on a coke-fueled night a few years earlier, bought a used BMW and moved back to Manhattan full-time to live in a nice big duplex on the Upper East Side. Now he could buy dinner anywhere. Uptown at Elaine's, writers whose success he'd coveted just a few years earlier would approach him to talk, and then he'd go downtown to Nell's or the Odeon, always the Odeon, and models would slip him their phone number on a piece of paper. "Jay started going to a lot of parties," Merry would write in SPY magazine in 1990. "Everyone wanted Jay to do coke. They wanted him to be the character in the book." The married McInerney quickly gained something of a man-about-town reputation while Merry was nowhere to be seen.
Slowly, McInerney morphed from writer to news item. Stories about his flirting and late nights—usually flanked by his editor Fisketjon, whose own stature in the publishing world was growing by leaps and bounds—were more popular than discussions of his work. Almost immediately after he found literary stardom, tiny cracks in the surface started to appear. "There was something sort of sad about being at these parties and watching Jay run into the bathroom with a couple of girls, and me just standing there feeling like, What the fuck am I doing here?" his future ex-wife wondered.
Less Than Zero came out in May of 1985, a month after the NYU panel, and was the year's big sensation, just as Bright Lights, Big City had been a year earlier. "This is one of the most disturbing novels I've read in a long time," Michiko Kakutani wrote in a laudatory review of the debut.
By 1986, Ellis and Eisenstadt had moved down to New York. Ellis was now the bright young star; Eisenstadt had submitted her semi-autobiographical novel about kids in a Queens beach town; and Tartt, naturally, was the class valedictorian. McGinniss seemed almost hell-bent on helping his favorite students get book deals. When Eisenstadt received word that Simon & Schuster wanted to pay the recent grad $5,000 for her novel, McGinniss made some calls, and soon Knopf doubled their offer for her book. Not long after that, Sydney Pollack bought the rights to the film for another $50,000.
McInerney and Ellis were soaking up success. After the publication of Less Than Zero, the press made it seem like they were attached at the hip, reporting on their late nights out and comparing their books any chance they could, as they both centered around young, good-looking people doing drugs and living miserable lives, all lit by the neon glow of the early 1980s.
McInerney was still sizing up the younger writer, and felt a burgeoning friendship between them—and maybe a bit of jealousy. "The attention that it was getting," McInerney says of Less Than Zero, "the extra-literary attention, was kind of extraordinary." The duo attended the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards together, an event novelists are rarely, if ever, invited to; McInerney says they found the event "silly." But they both earned their reputations: McInerney partied with the rich, beautiful, and famous; Ellis, the personification of young and cool, was sent back to Los Angeles to spend a night with Judd Nelson on assignment for Vanity Fair. In his own interviews, he chugged drinks while sounding cryptic and doomed: "I'm sure I'm going to get some deadly disease any second, like AIDS or cancer," he told the now-defunct Los Angeles Times Magazine.
The "toxic twins," the press called them, since they, sometimes along with Fisketjon or Entrekin, were often spotted at trendy New York clubs like Area, or Tribeca dives like Puffy's and Racoon Lodge, drinks in hand, eyes bloodshot. "I think there was a sense that we were having too much fun," McInerney believes. "The literary establishment's pretty conservative. Writers are supposed to be these sort of introverted loners who are badly dressed. We didn't fit that mold."
Tama Janowitz had also enjoyed a good deal of success as a young writer—a prestigious Bread Loaf fellowship; a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; the publication of her 1981 debut novel, and a handful of stories in The New Yorker—but was in a different orbit. Her friendship with Warhol opened up doors closed off to other writers. "You just sit at your typewriter every day and you're just staring into space," she says. "And then if you get a chance, it's like, 'I'd like to try something different: so that's what it's like to be a model, that's what it's like to fly on a private plane.'"
Like Ellis and McInerney, she went to all the best parties and clubs. She'd hung out with the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious in England, where she'd been living as a Vidal Sassoon hair salon model, and was regularly seen rubbing shoulders with art world heavyweights, long before McInerney and Ellis had their first books out. But after her first book came and went without much success, she went back to the drawing board. Instead of another novel, she thought, "Well, I'll just write short stories; at least they don't take a whole year or two." Short fiction for an era of short attention spans: both Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero had low page counts, and Janowitz's small doses of urban fiction seemed to work better. Soon enough, she was appearing on Late Night with David Letterman and approached for photo shoots with major fashion magazines. "I was just knocked down so hard," she says. "My publishing company said, 'Let's make a video of you and we can use that as a promotional piece. Then some guy writes in Esquire, 'She has a video. That's not what a writer would do, and she claims that in the future that all writers will be making videos.'"
McInerney and Ellis were friends whose books you could conceivably connect because of their themes and flat tones. Janowitz, for all intents and purposes, was thrown into the brat pack mix because it was convenient. "I really can count on one hand the number of dinners I actually had with her," Ellis recalls of Janowitz. They weren't friends, but the newspapers and magazines made it seem like they were. The new guard, seemingly looking for media attention, not being very writerly. "I didn't know those guys," Janowitz says echoing Ellis. "We would bump into each other at various things we had been invited to, but it was like creating a movement, as if somehow we had been hanging out together beforehand."
Yet when her 1986 short story collection, Slaves of New York, was published, McInerney, the reigning king of downtown fiction, was tasked with reviewing the book. "As a writer, it is possible to be too hip," he wrote in a lukewarm review. The next day, Janowitz was featured on the cover of New York, standing in a meat locker and looking like a goth queen, in a black dress with skull earrings. "A female Jay McInerney?" reads the caption in a photo for the accompanying story.
F. Scott Fitzgerald died while trying to move away from the tired "Jazz Age" tag that followed him, finally succumbing to a heart attack at 44. Jack Kerouac supposedly hated the idea of a "Beat Generation." Writers generally don't like to be attached to a movement; they aren't individuals anymore.
Ellis, McInerney, Janowitz, Eisenstadt and Tartt weren't the only members of the "literary brat pack": at times, the press also anointed David Leavitt, Susan Minot, Meg Wolitzer, and Mark Lindquist—really, any writer who sold their first books before age 30—as part of the group. (Even Jonathan Lethem, who went to Bennington with Ellis, Tartt, and Eisenstadt for two years before dropping out, and didn't publish his first novel until 1994, has been lumped into the group on occasion, although he's has taken every opportunity to deflect the notion.) Especially for McInerney and Ellis, the label was like a bad smell getting washed out of your clothes after a crazy night out.
McInerney's second novel, Ransom, had come and gone with a few good reviews and a handful of bad ones, but without the impact of his first offering. People were more interested in gossiping about his now-failing marriage and the on-set troubles of Bright Lights, Big City's film adaption— how it had gone through three directors, five screenwriters, and a studio that was shy about a heartthrob like Michael J. Fox playing an unlikable cokehead.
Both Ellis' film adaptation of Less Than Zero and his second book, The Rules of Attraction, came out in the fall of '87. For Eisenstadt, the timing of Ellis' new novel, along with the fact that they had been classmates, meant that their fates were intertwined. Her 1987 debut, From Rockaway, reads almost like a Richard Linklater script, filled with burnouts and young slackers, and it's a great first novel, but the press didn't really see it: it hit bookshelves just as the media was starting to turn on her contemporaries. Several mentions of Eisenstadt pointed out her Bennington education, and drew unflattering comparisons to Ellis and his newest book. The media had grown tired of the literary brat pack. In the September 1987 Vanity Fair, James Wolcott wrote a column about "The Young and the Wasted"—namely McInerney, Janowitz, Ellis, and Eisenstadt. "Here they come, too numb to feel, too cool to care," he wrote.
From 1987 onward, McInerney would put out a handful of good books, but never duplicate the success of his first. Janowitz would fall mostly off the literary radar by the 1990s. (In an interesting twist, even though they claimed never to be that close, when Jay and Merry McInerney went to court to finaliSe their divorce, Janowitz—along with Ellis and Michael J. Fox—were on the list of possible witnesses.) Eisenstadt would put out one more novel in 1991, and Ellis would find his greatest success—and biggest controversy—that same year with the publication of American Psycho. When excerpts of the book about serial killing yuppie banker Patrick Bateman were leaked to the press, one publishing house canceled it amid in-house protests, and Ellis received death threats.
The brat pack's outlier found the longest lasting success: "Donna Tartt is going to be very famous very soon," James Kaplan wrote in a 1992 Vanity Fair profile of the writer. A decade earlier, a few of Tartt's college classmates were pre-ordained pretty much the same way, but Tartt waited to put out The Secret History, relying on the same agent, editor, and publisher trio who worked with McInerney and Ellis.
The Odeon is quiet for a late Thursday night. Maybe it's the slow but persistent drizzle; maybe the dinner crowd has already left; maybe people just don't spend all night here like they used to. That's not to say it isn't still a fine restaurant and you won't have to wait for a table if you show up at the height of lunch or dinner, but now it's old guard. People stop in for an afternoon martini after they drop off their kids with the nanny.
Jay McInerney turned out almost like you'd imagine one of his characters would: in 2006 he married Anne Hearst, granddaughter of famed newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (whose family went on to create the company that publishes Harper's Bazaar) and sister of Patricia Hearst. He's dedicated much of his time to writing about wine and is the wine critic for Town and Country (another Hearst publication). His tenth novel, Bright Precious Days, hit the shelves on a humid day this past August, his first in a decade, and the final chapter in the New York City story of Russell and Corrine Calloway, a pair of New York City characters whose exploits in the publishing world and New York society sound suspiciously like a number of McInerney's acquaintances.
Exactly a week later, Tama Janowitz's memoir Scream—containing less than a page dedicated to her association with Ellis and McInerney—came out. Janowitz, who now lives in Upstate New York, focuses on her early days in the city, her friendship with Warhol, her parents, and leaving New York City once and for all. She doesn't miss Manhattan; not the way it is now, anyway. Her fiction and memoir offer a glimpse into the time that was, and why current-day New York City life doesn't compare.
Although rumors of a new book titled Tranquil Reflections have circulated for a few years now, Bret Easton Ellis routinely states that he's not so interested in writing fiction these days: "Now I want to get back to that adolescent passion of film," he says. He wrote and co-produced 2013's widely panned The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan and the adult film star James Deen. Currently, he hosts an eponymous podcast, and his directorial debut, a television show for the video streaming service Fullscreen called The Deleted, will debut in 2017.
In 2014, the famously reclusive Donna Tartt (the only "brat pack" member who didn't allow an interview for this story) won a Pulitzer Prize for her third novel The Goldfinch. And next year, Little, Brown, the same publisher who released Tartt's award-winner, will publish Eisenstadt's novel Swell. Like her classmate, it is also Eisenstadt's third book overall and first in over 25 years. But unlike Tartt's famous slow pace, there might be something else behind Eisenstadt's wait to put out another novel. The press was particularly mean to her, she says: critics often treated her less like a novelist and more like a young woman who went to school with other famous young writers, and got a book deal because of it. Living in Brooklyn, not too far from where she grew up, Eisenstadt is soft-spoken and humble. Those were different times, she says, recalling the fun she had going to fancy publishing parties ("the kind they don't have anymore") and getting to wear expensive clothes for magazine shoots—but maybe her first books came out at the wrong time. Now, with the brat pack 30 years in the rearview window, maybe Eisenstadt's work, and that of her colleagues, will be revisited in a different context. Three decades later, we can finally read their books in a different light.
