The Bennington-Knopf Connection

ONCE UPON A time, Bennington College was known as the most expensive school in the country, the rural refuge for rich flakes. But these days, the Vermont college also seems to be the place to go if you want to graduate a published writer. Just two years ago, while he was still a Bennington junior, Bret Easton Ellis hit the bestseller list with Less Than Zero, an up-in-coke account of Los Angeles life. The book was recently followed by The Rules of Attraction, a bright-lights-big-campus story about life at a small liberal arts school.

This month, Ellis is joined in hot-young-writer circles by Jill Eisenstadt, Bennington class of '85 whose new novel Far Rockaway is getting the big push from publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Eisenstadt's book tells of the drinking and drowning bouts of lifeguards in "Rotaway," a seedy New York beach, and specifically of Alex, who escapes the sand and sea when she gets a scholarship from a New England college.

Which brings us to Eisenstadt herself, a Rockaway refugee who befriended Ellis while both were in writing workshops at Bennington. The pair have appeared on the Today show together, share a mentor (author Joe McGinnis) and both have set their novels in the imaginary campus of Camden (read: Bennington). But Eisenstadt resents the unavoidable comparisons between their work. "It's annoying because I don't think it's fair to either of the books, although I do like the guy a lot," she says of Ellis, while sitting and sipping water in her publisher's New York office, "We both decided independently to write books about a college like Bennington, but his vision of it is a lot different from mine."

NONETHELESS, lumping this gruesome twosome together is both inevitable and not very favorable to either. Vogue Magazine suggested that the only people who should be reading the two books are parents of Bennington students, because "within ten minutes of finishing either, you will be on your way up to Vermont to pull your kid out." And in Vanity Fair, James Wolcott wrote an almost scholarly piece on the chroniclers of the young and wasted, pronouncing them "too numb to feel, to cool to care...Current fiction is festooned with their razor cuts and insignia. Listen closely and the lite-FM melodies of Ann Beattie snarl into a more hostile noise."

To meet Jill Eisenstadt, however, is to be underwhelmed, and this is not an insult. She seems astonishingly normal and low-key, the kind of person who claims she previously couldn't even answer questions at interviews. Despite her Irish-looking face, she says, "I'm really Jewish, even though I don't look it."

She makes the distinction to ward off any suggestions that From Rockaway is any more than somewhat autobiographical. Unlike the Catholic-school casualties she describes in her story, Eisenstadt went to public school and lived in a different neighborhood in Rockaway. She's never been to a "death keg" party, never jumped off a 40-foot bridge into the Atlantic's mucky low tide, and has never taken part in any other beach-bum antics. "A lot of the stories in the book are true--or at least I've heard them as true," she says. "But it's based on people I've seen, but didn't really know--I didn't know what was going on in their heads--so I just made up what they were like."

AND EISENSTADT'S imagination has served her well for the novel's Rockaway scenes--which emerge as perceptive, believeable, and realistic. No one will find Eisenstadt's characters as jaded and junky as Ellis' typical waste cases, and she is quite defensive about that difference. "I don't think my characters have slept with 72 people. They're not cynical about what's happened to them or what hasn't happened to them. They're not full of loathing and spite," Eisenstadt says. "They're just looking for love."

Well, maybe some of them are, but it's hard to call Eisenstadt's subjects soft and sensitive, although they are often quite funny in their callousness.

What many readers who remember their own college days will find troubling in From Rockaway are the Camden College scenes--full of bleary-eyed dialogue, Dress To Get Laid parties, and a lot of action without much thought. Once again, Eisenstadt claims this was nothing like her own experience at Bennington, which she says she "liked a lot, but I'm sure everyone is picturing fictional Camden." She adds that "Bennington is really a very good school. I really worked very hard. I didn't have much of a social life there, which is funny considering how the book comes across."

EISENSTADT IS particularly uncomfortable with being grouped in the literary brat pack that includes Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Jay McInerney and others. "I've gotten a lot of vicious reviews and I of course hate it," she says. "But you end up being criticized for what collectively is wrong with the books. Whereas there are things wrong with my book, of course, but they don't end up saying that because they're not looking at the individual book,"

"I think it mostly has to do with that we're young and certain people don't like the idea that we're getting books published, which is their right. But it's not really our fault," Eisenstadt adds. "I sometimes wonder if I were middle-aged what the reviews would be like, because they'd be a lot different. But I guess I wouldn't have written a book like this if I were middle-aged."

And were she much older, Eisenstadt would not have benefitted from the publicity she is getting as a novice novelist; like so many first works, From Rockaway could have easily gotten lost on bookstore shelves. Of course, these days, all the interviews she does are keeping Eisenstadt away from her favorite activity--writing--although she expects to finish her next book, which won't be about Rockaway, some time next year.

Jill Eisenstadt hopes that unlike From Rockaway, the second novel will stand on its own binding. "I don't mean to sound defensive," she says at the end of our interview. "But that's the thing--people are always making me defensive about the book when it's supposed to speak for itself without you having to defend it to people. And that makes you feel like you really failed as a writer, because people aren't understanding it."