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Every year about 100,000 Americans, Brits and Australians between the ages of 18 and 35 hit a "circuit of work, travel and partying" that runs in a triangle from Tokyo to Goa to Bangkok. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, Karl Taro Greenfeld was among this herd of revelers. His new book, "Standard Deviations: Growing Up and Coming Down in the New Asia," follows Greenfeld, then a struggling writer with dreams of greatness, deep into the heart of this self-indulgent backpacker culture of drugs, sex, endless parties and beaches. Along the way we meet some fascinating characters: beautiful Thai prostitutes who turn out to be men masquerading as women; a Russian gangster named Naddy, and "Tommy," a prescient Indonesian stockbroker and member of the ruling oligarchy. And of course, there's the beautiful English woman with Balinese tattoos and a gift for sage insights such as "Your fears, they're like a person you keep seeing over and over again--they follow you around until you find a way not to be afraid anymore." All the while, Greenfeld is gradually spiraling into drug addiction.
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.
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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.
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