BOOKS
89
THE
DEPRESSION GENERATION
YOU CAN'T SLEEP HERE,
by Edward Newhouse. Macaulay.
$2.00.
This is the first novel by a member of what might be called the "de–
pression" generation-as distinguished from the preceding "speakeasy"
generation, whose autobiography has been recorded in
Exile's Return.
The difference between these two groups is traced in the only "philosophi–
cal" passage which adorns
You Can't Sleep Here:
"I had not been accustomed to consider myself part of a gen–
eration, so-called, but staying in Central Park and in the libraries
and passing street corners in Manhattan, how could I escape it?
"This was not a lost generation. These young people had
never found themselves....
"I had not consorted with my generation. Usually there
were ten to fifteen years' differences between my friends and me.
My friends had been the lost generation, and I did not completely
understand them because their limitations were. not my limita–
tations....
"I was the crisis generation who had never been absorbed
into industry or the professions. . . . We had all the old prob–
lems.... But we had also something new, the passing of eco–
nomic security. We college and high school and public school
graduates were certain of our economic future. The pile of lum–
ber and cement under the billboards [to be used for building a
shack in a Hooverville] was Connie's immediate economic future
and mine. The public comfort station down the block and left–
over buns at the automat and hourly supervision by twirling bats
were our certainties."
Such a passage tempts the critic to regard this novel as a testament of the
newest literary generation, as a sort of inverted
This Side of Paradise
of
the early nineteen-thirties. However, there is little else in the book which
would relate it in the same way to its generation as, say,
Mooncalf
is
identified with the literary radicals of two generations before.
As a matter of fact, the passage is altogether misleading, for the
novel does not "Tecord moods and reactions typical of the new literary
generation, or of any other sector of American youth.
The reasons for this are not very difficult to discover. In the first
place, Newhouse has not set out to write a book which encompasses the
range of experience one is accustomed to find in a "social" novel like
Pere Goriot
or
The Shadow Before.
Indeed,
You Can't Sleep Here
is
hardly a novel in the traditional literary sense. It is limited to a slight,
racy story, which skips through a brief period of time and a single series
of events. Moreover, these experiences arr: new and unfamiliar to the
