Word: gutwillig
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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AFTER LONG SILENCE (350 pp.)-Robert Gutwillig-Little, Brown...
...lost, silent, or beat-are presumed to share one quality: youth. After Long Silence, a first novel by Manhattan's 26-year-old Robert Gut-willig, is symptomatic of a recent fictional tendency to portray the yo.ung as prematurely aged and jaded. A scabrous episode early in Author Gutwillig's book suggests its Sagantiquated antics: "Males and females were naked to the waist. The couples seemed to be licking each other's shoulders, necks, and chests . . . Each couple had a little can with holes in the top-like a large salt cellar-and from time to time...
Zombis in Hipster-land. This bizarre rite, called the "cinnamon caper," is disdained by Author Gutwillig's hero Tom Freeman, but he and his pals indulge in such mellow old youth-novel capers as fornication, abortion, homosexuality and illicit Negro-white love affairs. These goings-on take place at or near an Ivy Leaguish college named Arden that physically resembles Cornell, but the true locale is hipsterland, and the hero's quest for identity is as manic as if he were looking for a hypodermic needle in a haystack. Stylistically, Author Gutwillig tries to evoke Scott Fitzgerald...
After Long Silence is revealing in spite of its author, not because of him. Fitzgerald's "flaming youth'' was consciously breaking social taboos even when it did no more than kiss and pet. Novelist Gutwillig's off-beat generation takes its sinning much more casually, but jabs itself with sensations for the sake of sensations. The author's implied excuse for their frantic frivolities is apocalyptic-apres nons the fallout. But back of it all is the eternal romantic urge of the young to live in and for the moment. The unwitting pathos of Author...