Late Bloomers: Coming of Age in Today's America: The Right Place at the Wrong Time.

AN INTENT anyway, Late Bloomers, by David Lipsky and Alexander Abrams, is among the more serious in the long line of books and articles about the group of people variously known as Generation X, Baby Busters, and twentysomethings. Ours is a generation much maligned and apparently, at least to ourselves, endlessly fascinating. Ours is also a generation frequently misunderstood by writers of books and articles. Lipsky and Abrams set out to explain, with the help of impressive research, how these misunderstandings developed. They then go on to develop a whole new set of misunderstandings, and declare the discussion over.

A slim yet portentous tome, Late Bloomers is by turns infuriating, clever, insightful, and predictable. Mostly it's infuriating. In a field dominated by casual trend-spotting, Lipsky and Abrams have hard data and sociological information to contribute--all of which they undermine with a steady drumbeat of wrongheaded interpretation. Often I found myself wondering, "How can you be so smart and yet so clueless?"

The premise of Late Bloomers is that today's twentysomethings are not fundamentally different from yesterday's. Beneath our facade of ironic detachment, we share the same all-American values as our parents and their parents. We want successful careers in well-paying fields, our own homes and cars, and nice, happy families.

This is meant to refute a public image that first appeared in a 1990 Time cover story. In that article, and in the countless more that followed it in that inexorable media-as-rolling-snow-ball way, twentysomethings were depicted as lazy, apathetic, indecisive whiners. As for our work ethic, our motto was said to be, "Earn the maximum for the minimum."

Lipsky and Abrams have a great deal of fun demolishing these myths by playing the media against themselves. From the mid to late 1980s, they point out, the conventional wisdom on Baby Busters was completely different. "They are planners. They look ahead with certainty. They have priorities," declared The New York Times Magazine in 1987.

"These young men and women are confident, ambitious, and smart," echoed Fortune in 1989. "Seldom have the personal attitudes of a graduating class meshed so neatly with the needs of businesses."

What changed between 1989 and 1990, say Lipsky and Abrams, was not young people, but the economy. When the recession hit, "it was easiest to believe that if young adults weren't working, it was because they no longer wanted to work. To believe that the economy had shifted in such a way as to make employment very hard to come by for anyone just out of college was dispiriting, and would have required a very different set of responses by the country."

It's a compelling argument, but it leads Lipsky and Abrams to a weird impasse. They recast the Generation X story as a debate between free will and determinism. Are twentysomethings doomed because they don't want to succeed, or because they can't succeed? Lipsky and Abrams believe they are defending young people by coming down on the side of determinism. You see, it's not our fault.

The only problem is they've robbed us of our right to say, Maybe we're not doomed at all. The authors really do mean doomed, and here's where it gets infuriating. Remember those all-American values? The career, the house and car, the family? For Lipsky and Abrams these are no mere goals but matters of Tillichian ultimate concern. Active participation in the economy (of which having a family, they say, is the quintessential expression) is the meaning of life.

That's why the book begins, "Think of the twentysomethings you know. Aren't they just the tiniest bit ... disappointing?" How could they not be, living in grungy apartments or with their parents, working at copy shops? People can smell [failure] on you," insist the authors. "Friends, family can be wonderfully supportive, but eventually they wonder when the story will change. We talked about this already, didn't we? Last year? So why are we still talking about it?" Imagine what the non-supportive people are saying.

It gets worse. We despair because "we've had to give up our taste in furnishings ... in clothes and in food." We can't go to parties or date because we'll have to admit that we're underemployed (or "you look for people below your old ambition level, people who won't be offended by your ladder-spot in life" . We can't even joke about it because "there's a danger in gallows humor, that the brain will overhear it and think it's serious." A little whining would be a relief at this point.

Curiously, Lipsky and Abrams themselves, both in their late twenties, don't seem the least bit doomed. According to the authors' capsule biographies on the dust jacket, Lipsky is a widely published author who teaches at Johns Hopkins. Abrams is an attorney turned marketing consultant. Surely they can afford the house and family, and have enough left over for a dog.

But there's a bigger problem, which really threatens their thesis: Isn't it possible after all that money is not the be-all and end-all of existence? Lipsky and Abrams's dodge--that we don't want a lot of money, just enough--can't disguise the fact that they still have their priorities all wrong.

Early in the book they mention a 1990 survey in which 76 per cent of college freshmen listed "Being Very Well Off Financially" as their most important goal, while only 37 per cent chose "Developing a Meaningful Philosophy of Life." Lipsky and Abrams bring this up to show how normal we are, that we're not the slackers we're portrayed as in the media.

Still, you can't help wishing they had talked to that 37 per cent. After all, the twentysomethings I know aren't disappointing, despite grungy apartments or boring jobs. They have lives beyond furnishings, clothes, and food. They have writing, music, art, and passion. Many of them even have nice apartments and good jobs too. Being well off financially is probably number two on their lists. But just not having it as number one makes a hell of a difference.

Lipsky and Abrams call twentysomethings "late bloomers" because we can't afford, financially, to grow up. It's the last sentence in their book: "The ability to recognize and acquire the things you want must finally be what is meant by the word adult."

What do you say to someone who literally equates consumerism with maturity? That's not late blooming, that's stunted growth.

Mr. Radosh is a columnist for the New York Press.