Enough time has passed since the ascendance of the “literary brat pack” that we might be able to reorient its parts more accurately. Because they came at the same time in the 1980s, wrote about the same kinds of people, shared the same publishers, and caroused in the same clubs, the media made a diversified but questionably rated cultural commodity bond of the moment. But hindsight grants us the privilege of seeing just how incompatible their efforts were with each other. Tama Janowitz’s