Prozac Nation: A Memoir.

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.

What really is bothering these guys, with their impressive ability to come up with one synonym after another for egotism?

Of course there is something inherently egotistical about a 27-year-old writing her memoris. However, until she began taking the antidepressant Prozac, Miss Wurtzel's life really was about as harrowing as it could be--given that she is a middle-class New Yorker who went to private schools, then Harvard, followed by a succession of apparently effortless swings upward from plumb newspaper job to plumb magazine job to plumb book contract.

Is depression "bigger than a breadbox?" Miss Wurtzel wants to know, "smaller than an armoire?" As described here, her own bout with the condition strikes around the onset of puberty. At a posh summer camp, she intentionally overdoses on allergy medicine. From there on, "black waves" of depression pursue her. At lunch time in intermediate school, she retreats to the girls' locker room, amusing herself by drawing lines of blood from her legs with a razor blade:

I did not, you see, want to kill myself. Not

at that time, anyway. But I wanted to

know that if need be, if the desperation

got so terribly bad, I could inflict harm on

my body.... I tried out different

shapes--squares, triangles, pentagons,

even an awkwardly carved heart, with a

stab would at its center, wanting to see if

it hurt the way a real broken heart could

hurt. I was amazed and pleased to find

that it didn't.

In college, Miss Wurtzel is consumed by thoughts of suicide. One day she enthusiastically describes to her psychiatrist how, in her frequent fantasies, she would take her own life: "I would get into a steaming hot bath in the dark, because in the dark you can't see what you are doing to yourself so you can't get scared and you can't scream, and I would slash my wrists and maybe a couple of arteries." The doctor, alarmed, insists they drive over right that minute to the college infirmary--where Miss Wurtzel has already spent many nights under the influence of depressive symptoms. The girl agrees, but before leaving she locks herself in the bathroom and stuffs her mouth with Mellaril tablets, a powerful sedative--in a suicide attempt which eventually fails when Miss Wurtzel's digestive system rebels on its own initiative, making the old stomach-pump cure unnecessary.

Is Miss Wurtzel self-obsessed? Fifty years ago, if you were an unhappy young writer like she is--and you wanted to publicize you views about your city, your country, yourself as a representative citizen of either--you would write a novel. Today, you write your memoirs. We are used to new writers writing intensely about themselves, so the objection to her egotism doesn't stand up.

A woman very much of her times, attempting to get at the meaning of clinical depression both to herself and to the young Americans among whom it is the characteristic mental disturbance in the way neuresthenia was among affluent Victorians, Elizabeth Wurtzel has told her story in devastatingly clear prose, whose self-deprecating wit undercuts any danger that she'll annoy the hell out of us by telling too damn much about herself. So perhaps, more than any "grandiose self-pity," it is Miss Wurtzel's views that are the cause of all that hostility. For what goes unreported in the attack reviews is that Prozac Nation is less about Prozac than it is about another contemporary phenomenon: divorce.

Miss Wurtzel's parents split up two decades ago, but she still describes the event with a sadness that can break your heart. Visiting with her father and his new live-in girlfriend, Miss Wurtzel recalls (in italics, I'm not sure why): "when it was time for me to go to sleep, I would make my father leave [his] shoes, rusty brown half boots, in the hallway outside my bedroom door. I wanted them to be there so I could look out and know he was still there. It was like I knew he was planning to disappear on me"--which he eventually did.

It's Miss Wurtzel's presentation of divorce, not Prozac, that explains the reaction to Prozac Nation. You will note that all the criticism has come out of the leading organs of the New Class--the opinion-making cadre of the "cultural elite." From the perspective of New Class orthodoxy, it's fine to write about divorce. What you cannot do is point a finger at the chest of parents with children and announce: get divorced, and your children could suffer this.

Miss Wurtzel finds the depressing consequences of divorce everywhere, but especially in the new rules governing love, sex, contraception, pregnancy: "It is no surprise that a generation of children of divorce has grown into a world of extended adolescence in which so many of them have slept with one another and remained friends, have put the conflicts of sundered relationships aside for the sake of maintaining a coherent life. Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it's all pefectly normal in the morning." This--the essential cheapness of sexual relationships in the decades after the Summer of Love--is definitely forbidden ground, which Miss Wurtzel explores throughout these two hundred pages that are ostensibly about herself.

The (other) Pill? She skewers the coldly pragmatic view of many men in a conversation with her father--her father--recalled from high-school days. After his daughter tells him of a visit to Planned Parenthood, Mr. Wurtzel's words of caring parental wisdom are: "I'm glad you're being so responsible."

Abortion? As a college sophomore, she discovers she is pregnant when, one morning, she wakes up to find blood all over her sheets. A miscarriage. Hours later she overhears a doctor remark casually, "She's a very lucky girl. Now she won't have to have an abortion." At which--the coolness, the cruelty--Miss Wurtzel is rightly horrified: "I'd sooner kill myself. I'd have sooner killed the doctor standing over me smiling knowingly when she didn't know a thing."

Divorce in this memoir stands for the dissolution of all types of human bonds and interlocking responsibilities. In the lives of most people, marriage is the one existential decision we are given to make. Until recently, a man engaged to be wed made a leap of faith into the near-certainty that he would remain in the relationship until either he or his spouse was dead. Today, with children or not, one remains in a marriage until it ceases to suit you. As Miss Wurtzel sees it, if we want to explain the prevalence of depression--and the popularity of Prozac--that fact is highly relevant: "Sometimes," she writes, in italics again,

I think that I was forced to withdraw into

depression because it was the only rightful

protest I could throw in the face of a world

that siad it was all right for people to

come and go as they please, that there

were simply no real obligations left....

My father had a child that he didn't have

too much trouble walking away from; it

seems only natural that so many of us

have pregnancies that we can abandon

even more easily. After a while, meaning

and implication detach themselves from

everything. If one can be a father and as-

sume no obligations, it follows that one

can be a boyfriend and do nothing at all.

...Pretty soon it seems unreasonable to

be bothered or outraged by much of any-

thing because, well, what did you expect?

In a world where the core social unit--the

family--is so dispensable, how much can

anything else mean?

There is a chill as I think of the way

being deprived of normal feelings has the

paradoxical effect of turning me into an

emotional wreck. As Russian writer

Aleksandr Kuprin put it: "Do you under-

stand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in

just this: that there is no horror!" Young Americans are depressed and hooked on Prozac today, in other words, because other Americans had a blast twenty years ago. It is an enticing, if unprovable, theory.

What is clear is that Elizabeth Wurtzel has written an indictment, oblique but powerfully affecting because so deeply personal, of the sexual revolution and all it entails: the morality that imposes no obligations except to be outraged when somebody else suggests there may be obligations. That morality is the foundation stone of all New Class thought on social matters. No wonder the news publications took offense.

Actually, that needs a qualifier. If Miss Wurtzel were someone other than who she is--a young woman who wears black and lives in a loft, whose New Class credentials (New York City, Harvard, slick media jobs galore) are in exemplary order--she could be safely ignored. But she goes out of her way to assure her hip, urban readers that she belongs to their world, their family--with ritual, incantatory references to "the greedy Eighties" and "Reaganomics," the assurance that she too "marched on Washington" for abortion rights--not realizing that this will only inflame her liberal critics.

Highly orthodox societies work in similar ways. Like the Spanish Inquisition--which reserved its bonfires not for unbelievers but for professing Christians, who sometimes insisted on their orthodoxy to the very end--the New Class finds that heresy stings most when it comes from within. Of course our present-day inquisitors can't kill you, but they can torch your career. That's what is happening to Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose cries of "greedy Eighties!" and "march on Washington!" can't save her as she's led off to be burned.