Word: janowitz
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EISENSTADT IS particularly uncomfortable with being grouped in the literary brat pack that includes Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Jay McInerney and others. "I've gotten a lot of vicious reviews and I of course hate it," she says. "But you end up being criticized for what collectively is wrong with the books. Whereas there are things wrong with my book, of course, but they don't end up saying that because they're not looking at the individual book...
...yuppie market, hot new writers like Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis are packaged and hyped as fashionable commodities...
...plugged into the latest trends. Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Jill Eisenstadt and other young novelists who currently rouse the bid-lust of Manhattan publishers were raised on pseudo events. Particularly flamboyant evidence of this can be seen in the self-promotions of their colleague Tama Janowitz, author of Slaves of New York...
...also closing in on ubiquity. Janowitz has appeared in magazine advertisements for Amaretto and Rose's Lime Juice. Her face pops up with increasing frequency in newspapers and magazines, and she has given the MTV generation its first performance-writer by making videotapes to plug Slaves as well as Cannibal. The latter is the story of a well-read tribal chief who becomes the toast of the asphalt jungle and accidentally eats his wife at a barbecue. Janowitz has a catchy style and achieves her satiric effects with a sly Valley Girl delivery. Slaves cartoons the downtown-Manhattan art scene...
Self-promotion and celebrity may not bring down Western civilization, though they have harmed writers with considerably more to show and say than Janowitz and other young bright lights of the moment. F. Scott Fitzgerald paid the price of fame, but, says the critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin, "he wanted to be the best. I don't hear anyone talking of being the best today. Books are now made as movies are. There is no belief that a book has a long life. Writers have abandoned the idea of making a masterpiece. Now they are Hollywood venture capitalists and accomplices...