Usually when a book is published by an obscure author and subsequently judged to be bad, it is allowed to pass unmolested by critics through its brief stay on book-store shelves, after which it travels to the book crematoria to be recycled. Elizabeth Wurtzel’s excellent first book—a memoir of depression called Prozac Nation—might have ended up unnoticed except as kleenex. But an odd thing happened.
You’ve never heard of Miss Wurtzel. She is 27 and looks, in her back-flap photo, like a more zaftig version of Kate Moss. She worked briefly as a rock critic for The New Yorker and New York magazine, but apart from that was perfectly obscure. Nevertheless, around September 1, the nation’s great news publications began lining up to execute her by journalistic firing squad. The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, her former employers at New York, The Village Voice—each deployed a prominent review devoted to trashing Miss Wurtzel’s book in the nastiest and most personal terms available: “it’s pain . . . often seems fake,” “long moan,” “sorrowful arias,” “exaggerated,” “almost unbearable,” “grandiose self-pity,” “singular self-absorption,” “self-obsessed case study”— and that’s just New York magazine.
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