All the Old Young Men

AFTER LONG SILENCE (350 pp.)--Robert Gutwillig--Little, Brown ($4).

Younger generations--lost, silent, or beat--are presumed to share one quality: youth. After Long Silence, a first novel by Manhattan's 26-year-old Robert Gut-willig, is symptomatic of a recent fictional tendency to portray the yo.ung as prematurely aged and jaded. A scabrous episode early in Author Gutwillig's book suggests its Sagantiquated antics: "Males and females were naked to the waist. The couples seemed to be licking each other's shoulders, necks, and chests . . . Each couple had a little can with holes in the top--like a large salt cellar--and from time to time they would stop their licking and shake out some stuff over each other ... I started sniffing and smelled cinnamon ... I focused on one of the standing couples, and the boy stopped, and snarled at me, 'Get your own date.'''

Zombis in Hipster-land. This bizarre rite, called the "cinnamon caper," is disdained by Author Gutwillig's hero Tom Freeman, but he and his pals indulge in such mellow old youth-novel capers as fornication, abortion, homosexuality and illicit Negro-white love affairs. These goings-on take place at or near an Ivy Leaguish college named Arden that physically resembles Cornell, but the true locale is hipsterland, and the hero's quest for identity is as manic as if he were looking for a hypodermic needle in a haystack. Stylistically, Author Gutwillig tries to evoke Scott Fitzgerald but merely invokes him. His novel's value is as a minority report of a post-Korean war generation that is less interested in revolting against society than seceding from it.

The book moves as plotlessly as a dream. Tom is an upper Bohemian who lives on "infusions" from a trust fund and beds down off-campus with a girl named Lila, who frets about being half-Jewish but whose physique is as firm as her psyche is wobbly. Lila is one of the zombi women who people modern fiction; she exists to do Tom's will. Tom himself plays zombi to Chris Hunt, a kind of ex-G.I. Dorian Gray who "tinkers with machines and people" and usually cracks up both.

Aprees Nous the Fallout. The Tom-Lila-Chris axis turns mainly on romanticized undergraduate japes, e.g., a ten-day blackjack game, a 100-mile drive in a stolen milk truck. The trio and their clique habitually see life through one too many cocktail glasses, but the stem of boredom keeps breaking between their fingers. Chris bleeds to death in an auto crash, and Tom and Lila individually reach respectability across the great divide that separates the hipsters from the squares.

After Long Silence is revealing in spite of its author, not because of him. Fitzgerald's "flaming youth'' was consciously breaking social taboos even when it did no more than kiss and pet. Novelist Gutwillig's off-beat generation takes its sinning much more casually, but jabs itself with sensations for the sake of sensations. The author's implied excuse for their frantic frivolities is apocalyptic--apres nons the fallout. But back of it all is the eternal romantic urge of the young to live in and for the moment. The unwitting pathos of Author Gutwillig's characters is that the only way they can make time stand still is to kill it.

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