The Nation: Mom’s Kids

As the father of “momism” in Generation of Vipers, Polemicist-Novelist Philip Wylie has a certain reputation to live up to. In his own way, he turned the crank letter into a literary form. In that eruption 29 years ago, he added to the sum of human choler by announcing, among other things: “Gentlemen, mom is a jerk.”

Well, all right. In the years since, even Sophie Portnoy has survived. Now Wylie, the kind of man who spindles and mutilates his phone bills as a matter of principle, has come forth with Sons and Daughters of Mom. Wylie turns his venom from Mom to Mom’s long-haired Woodstock children: “second generation vipers” or “arrogant pipsqueaks” given to “self-pity and vacuous dreams.” Are the young correct that no one listens to them? Says Wylie: “Too Goddamn many people listen to them.”

It is difficult, though, to dislike a curmudgeon who so improbably combines the sensibilities of Spiro Agnew and Herbert Marcuse, a mind endowed with such splenetic fury that it damns kids, television commentators and Silent Majority alike. Any man with the perverse gall to propose raising the national voting age to 30 might be more interesting than his critics think.