Books: Nosepicking Contests

The Beat Generation of writing is forget it. Some curly new hair is coming up in Beardsville. The new boys still haven't found a name—The Camp Crowd? The Hallucinogeneration?—but they have brattishly proclaimed their principal preoccupations: LSD, pot, the Spirit of Berkeley, californication, and not fighting in Viet Nam. While there are only a few of them, they have begun to produce a noisy literature that confesses its mongrel origin in the cult of hip, the theater of the absurd, the works of Jack Kerouac, the pop art movement and some of the...