Pity the long lead. Quick on the heels of Michael Hirschorn’s Atlantic attack on “quirk” comes a similar effort by Melvin Jules Bukiet in this month’s American Scholar.

Hirschorn’s piece saw quirk everywhere: in books, movies, and preeminently in public radio’s This American Life. Bukiet’s article goes after something he rather clumsily calls “Brooklyn Books of Wonder”:

Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness….BBoWs are escape novels, albeit garnished with intellectual flourishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”

But though the éminence grise in Bukiet’s account is Paul Auster, not Ira Glass, it’s clear that he and Hirschorn are talking about the same thing. Several names (Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s) show up in both accounts. And their diagnoses—in Bukiet’s words, vanity mixed with “mock-naïve astonishment”—are pretty much the same.

I wrote before that Hirschorn went too soft on the softies. Bukiet’s not going to let them escape so easily:

Coddled and cosseted, they’re the first generation of novelists who grew up reading the young-adult pap that they’ve now regurgitated with a deconstructive gloss learned in college. Of course, such aspirations require equivalently high subject matter. Hence the BBoWs’s mock encounter with enormity. Still, they have no teeth. They’re sheep in wolves’ clothing who manage to write about bad things and make you feel good.

If Bukiet strikes deeper than Hirschorn, it’s probably because he working in fields not far from the better-known writers he’s aiming at. The publisher’s description of his book of short stories sounds like something Safran Foer might have gone in for:

In Stories of an Imaginary Childhood Melvin Jules Bukiet inscribes the world that might have been his own if not for the catastrophe that destroyed most of Jewish life in eastern Europe during the 1940s. Set before the Holocaust in the tiny Polish shtetl of Proszowice, each interconnected story follows the young protagonist through the pleasures and humiliations of childhood and the rites of manhood, as he fights against historical, social, and psychological forces that threaten to pull him down.

Bukiet’s article has its problems: only someone living in Manhattan could neglect the fact that the socioeconomic conditions that made Brooklyn Brooklyn have made a lot of other places like Brooklyn, too, which helps explain the BBoWs’ commercial success. It may be true that “all of these books instantly trigger the ‘Awww’ reflex of narcissistic empathy that makes readers, adoring the proximate cause of their own sensitivity, buy them by the truckload.” But the fact remains that there must be a large readership out there with stores of narcissistic empathy standing at the ready.

Still, Bukiet is plainly right to name the problem as a failure of character—the authors’ characters, not the books’—more than a failure of technique. (”Some,” he admits, “are stunning prose stylists (Eggers and [Michael] Chabon and [Nicole] Krauss) who clearly have literary talent to spare.”)

Which raises a bigger question, an old and still-open question: whether good long fiction can be written by twentysomethings. Surely exceptions can be found, but I suspect it’s no accident that the best young prose writers (Joyce, Roth, D’J Pancake) were all working in short forms in their twenties. And if it can’t be done, if producing long fiction is something that requires a certain amount of living in a way that writing poetry and painting and playing world-class chess do not, the perversity of a publishing industry that loves bright young things is all the more acute.