Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation

Most of the writers collected here fall deep into muddy generalizations such as those in David Greenberg's idyll to his own halcyon version of the '60s: ``They had communes; we get Melrose Place. They had the Pill; we get AIDS.'' One wonders, has he heard of Vietnam? Greenberg isn't the only 20-something writer who muffles his voice by burying it under the pillow of the past. Ian Williams starts his selection by telling how much he hates ``ain't-we-kids-got-angst'' generalizations and then proceeds to rant for 10 pages against the baby boomers. Eric Liu, the book's editor doesn't fare much better in his ``A Chinaman's Chance: Reflections on the American Dream.'' He chews the cud with phrases like ``national creed,'' ``freedom and opportunity'' and ``common responsibility.'' Surely we can expect more from ``Young Writers.'' Aren't they supposed to have new phrases that are combustible and arch? Not all the selections are dim. The good pieces are like Lalo Lopez's ``Generation Mex,'' in which the author views the generic subject as a sidebar to his own idiosyncratic story, beginning with a defiant glossary: ``vendido (ven-dee-doh) Sell out, see Hispanic. `Lalo wrote that essay for that gringo book. What a vendido!' '' Perhaps the best is Ted Kleine's ``Living the Lansing Dream.'' Unlike some of his co-contributors, his style is detail-rich so the result is a great story about a uniquely rendered trilogy--Kleine, Lansing and the '90s. Anthologies are the relay races of the literary world; in them, a team of writers hand off a topic like some sort of baton. Unfortunately, the baton in Next is a bit too big for most of the writers to carry. (May)