Young People's Pride: A Novel

It's 1920, and the war is over. The question is what comes next. At the Harlequin Club, a gathering of young artists, writers, and dreamersong has descended upon Johnny Chipman's apartment for an evening of debate, drink, and desperate ambition. Oliver Crowe, the playwright, and Ted Billett, the poet, circle each other with opposing visions of art and love: one chasing success, the other chasing transcendence. Around them, cartoonists argue with novelists about realism versus romance, Paris versus New York, and whether the old traditions can survive the new age. Benét captures something exacting and true about the particular hunger of young people on the make: the insecurity dressed up as confidence, the career anxieties masked as philosophical disputes, the way love and ambition get tangled together until you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. The prose snaps with the energy of people trying to convince themselves as much as each other. It's a period piece, yes, but the struggles are eternal: how to be serious about art without taking yourself too seriously, how to love without losing yourself, how to grow up without killing the thing that made you want to create in the first place.