SOURCE: "Madison Smartt Bell/Debra Spark," in his American Energies: Essays on Fiction, Morrow & Co., 1992, pp. 380-85.

In the excerpt below, Birkerts detects a "moviemaking" quality about Straight Cut, remarking: "I have no problem with that. Entertainment is entertainment. What bothers me is that the idea of literature got mixed in."

On the desk in front of me are two books, 20 Under 30: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers, edited by Debra Spark and Straight Cut, a novel by Madison Smartt Bell. The dust jacket of the latter features a cut-in color photograph of a handsome and brooding young man, and the author's biography begins: "Born in 1957 …" The note on the other book has me reaching for my cane: "Debra Spark was born in 1962 …" No doubt about it, the marketing mind has decided to locate the cutoff line between prodigy and ordinary adulthood at a round three-zero.

This...