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"Standard Deviations "
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
Villard, 272 pp, $23.95

Letter grade: B-

Every 15 years or so, some snotty punk who devoured Kerouac in high school is going to write about his walk on the wild side with enough panache to win over some publisher for a book deal. The coming-of-age of every generation's hipster-chic subculture is a recurring literary motif. After all, there's a powerful voyeuristic attraction to such a book.

Consider Karl Taro Greenfeld the latest in that line, as that's the feeling he evokes in his pseudo-journalistic recollection of his wonder years, Standard Deviations.

Greenfeld, who is now editor of Time Asia and the author of a previous book about Japan's youth subcultures, Speed Tribes, was a young, snotty punk who went to Japan in the late 1980s to teach English. He joined the wave of randy young westerners traveling "the circuit," a community of free-flowing travelers who work briefly to earn as much money as possible and then spend it all bouncing back and forth through Asia, looking for the next cheap thrill. Greenfeld followed the circuit from the techno nightclubs of Tokyo to remote beaches along the Gulf of Siam, observed the teetering status quo of Jakarta and found God - sort of - in a spiritual/sexual retreat in Pune, India.

The book's eight reminiscences and pseudo-fictionalized narratives are hung on Greenfeld's budding career as a journalist. "I was drawn to Asia to become a writer, intrigued by lurid tales of booms, busts, drugs, sex, violence, magic," he writes in the introduction, and magazine assignments fuel his jaunts from country to country.

Greenfeld finds plenty of sex, drugs and rocking raves. He begins the story when he quits his teaching job for a gig as a writer and editor for an English newspaper in Tokyo. It's part of his obsession with living "The Big Life" - his need to be famous, to make something of himself, to prove there's some value to his existence. But through much of the book, he equates better sex, better drugs and better jobs and assignments with having a better life. After a while, the search for visceral satisfaction becomes numbingly dull.

The problem is that such a manic bohemian existence gets tiresome not just for the reader but also for the memoirist, who inevitably has to grow up and find some center to his life. And when the author realizes how empty his life has become and how his recreational drug use has evolved into a nasty life- and career-wrecking heroin habit, it's somewhat hard for the reader to feel much empathy. The guy brought it on himself, after all.

We never get to connect with Greenfeld. It's almost as if his journalistic distance betrays the author, even when he's writing about the most intimate acts. He remains a cipher, uninvolved in the story, just an outsider watching it all go down. It's as if who he is doesn't matter, and that's a shame, because revealing more of his true self - not the horny, drug-addled, greedy, deluded numbskull that he delights in telling us about - would have made us care more about him.

What saves the book is that it's an often-entertaining glimpse into his generation for the voyeurs in us all.

This review ran in the Rocky Mountain News 2 Aug. 2002