It’s almost hackneyed by now to refer to Generation X as nihilistic and self-indulgent. But in some ways it is this jaded Gen-X cynicism and its consequences that “Standard Deviations” is really about. Even thousands of miles away from Western club scenes, a pretentious and cliquish ethos prevails. Greenfeld and his cronies endlessly sort people into categories of “cool” and “uncool.” To the reader, the travelers all come across as vacuous, materialistic and utterly uninterested in the cultures around them.
It’s a far cry from the ideals and mores that centered the great expatriate novels of the past. Ernest Hemingway spoke for his generation with tales of heroism and romance on the streets of Paris and in the hills of Spain and Italy. Decades later Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” captured a new generation of Americans with a parable about the folly and blindness of American idealism. It used to be that young Americans abroad were involved in great events, motivated by something larger than themselves.
“Standard Deviations” captures the empty cynicism of today’s young Americans–and their counterparts from England and Australia. There is little idealism in this book and but one heroic scene. As Suharto falls in Indonesia, a violent wave of anti-Chinese mob violence grips Jakarta. In the midst of the chaos, an American stockbroker named Laney risks his life in an effort to save his ethnic-Chinese love from a savage fate. But when he arrives, barefoot and bruised, at her gated compound, she has already left to seek out a former boyfriend. Laney reappears later in the book, just as jaded and cynical as everyone else.
As the book progresses, so does the narrator. Eventually, four years after his last drug-soaked foray on the circuit, Greenfeld returns to the scene of his youthful journeys on one last assignment. This time he is clean. Finally he sees the young travelers just as we have seen them–and him–all along. “They were capriciously peripatetic, these international ravers, but I had also begun to think of them as a bunch of smug, self-centered Ecstasy-swallowing morons,” he writes. “Standard Deviations” attests to the fact that Greenfeld, now editor of Time Asia, does eventually develop as an insightful, talented (and sober) writer able to capture exotic places and spin out a vastly entertaining yarn.
