Prozac Nation: A Memoir. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 7, 1994 by David Klinghoffer

have pregnancies that we can abandon

even more easily. After a while, meaning

and implication detach themselves from

everything. If one can be a father and as-

sume no obligations, it follows that one

can be a boyfriend and do nothing at all.

...Pretty soon it seems unreasonable to

be bothered or outraged by much of any-

thing because, well, what did you expect?

In a world where the core social unit--the

family--is so dispensable, how much can

anything else mean?

There is a chill as I think of the way

being deprived of normal feelings has the

paradoxical effect of turning me into an

emotional wreck. As Russian writer

Aleksandr Kuprin put it: "Do you under-

stand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in

just this: that there is no horror!" Young Americans are depressed and hooked on Prozac today, in other words, because other Americans had a blast twenty years ago. It is an enticing, if unprovable, theory.

What is clear is that Elizabeth Wurtzel has written an indictment, oblique but powerfully affecting because so deeply personal, of the sexual revolution and all it entails: the morality that imposes no obligations except to be outraged when somebody else suggests there may be obligations. That morality is the foundation stone of all New Class thought on social matters. No wonder the news publications took offense.

Actually, that needs a qualifier. If Miss Wurtzel were someone other than who she is--a young woman who wears black and lives in a loft, whose New Class credentials (New York City, Harvard, slick media jobs galore) are in exemplary order--she could be safely ignored. But she goes out of her way to assure her hip, urban readers that she belongs to their world, their family--with ritual, incantatory references to "the greedy Eighties" and "Reaganomics," the assurance that she too "marched on Washington" for abortion rights--not realizing that this will only inflame her liberal critics.

Highly orthodox societies work in similar ways. Like the Spanish Inquisition--which reserved its bonfires not for unbelievers but for professing Christians, who sometimes insisted on their orthodoxy to the very end--the New Class finds that heresy stings most when it comes from within. Of course our present-day inquisitors can't kill you, but they can torch your career. That's what is happening to Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose cries of "greedy Eighties!" and "march on Washington!" can't save her as she's led off to be burned.