The Big Read: A love song for Prufrock

Last week I was invited to a 21st birthday party. I was wary because it had been a while since I'd been to a 21st. The last one I'd attended was my own, and the damage was quite severe.

It was at a Mexican restaurant that no longer exists, and I booked a table but nervously, and I had a few drinks beforehand to thicken my skin because I'd never had a birthday party before and I didn't think anyone would come, but they did all come, and as they arrived they each bought a round of tequila. I remember the fourth or fifth person arriving, and after that I remember running through a rust-wire neighbourhood beside the River Plate with my clothes on fire, clutching a Polish sailor's disembarkation papers and shouting, "I am the walrus!"

But what do you give someone turning 21? What do kids today want? Wrist watches that deliver e-mails? Skateboards? Hard drugs? I don't know much about the young adults of 2014 except what everyone knows - that they're cynical and hedonistic and take cellphone videos of themselves having sex, that the boys play computer games and the girls take selfies, that they all take gap years and plan to leave the country behind and none of them reads books or has faith in anything, and who can blame them because they've been delivered into a world in which all the good stories have proved untrue and all their elders and role models are on Twitter.

I tried to remember what my people gave me for my 21st birthday, and it was tequila, for the most part, although my mom gave me a watch and my girlfriend at the time gave me a pool cue. I didn't think Karolien plays pool - it's too much of a manual craft for the soft-handed Kardashians of today - so I called to ask what gift I might bring without looking like an out-of-touch old duffer.

"Rather bring cash," she said, and my heart fell. It was all true. What a revolting generation. "Because I want to give it all to a charity," she went on.

This must be some sort of hoax. What are they trying to pull? When I was 21 the only act of charity I could half-imagine was someone feeling sufficiently sorry for me to have sex with me, but I arrived at the party and over the course of the evening I met a group of boys and girls, black and white and coloured, not getting blind-drunk on the free booze nor even looking judgmentally at us older adults who did. They were good kids who laughed and gossiped and they weren't a cult or a gang of religious freaks.

I spoke to two of them. One was from a wealthy middle-class background; one was not. They were both studying to become social workers.

"Why?" I asked. They looked at me as though I was some kind of simpleton who might well benefit from a house call and some professional intervention. "To help people," they said.

I was still reeling when I heard about another group of youngsters. A year ago four kids, 22 and 23 years old, started a literary magazine called Prufrock. It has photographs and illustrations and handsome binding and quite beautiful design. It features established names and new voices, fiction and essays, poetry and reportage, in English and Afrikaans and Zulu and Xhosa. The quality is baffling. How can there be so many kids writing so well for free when there are so many adults writing so badly for money?

Calling something a passion project can be patronising; it implies that it's so-so but worthy. Prufrock is something I'd take into a fist fight with any small magazine of writing in the world, now or in the past, but there's passion there that over-ripened, time-ruined know-alls like me struggle to understand. Helen Sullivan put her money in for the first edition - leftover money from a bursary and money earned from a part-time job; drinking money, gap-year money, money that would have fallen through my young fingers like water without a trace. James King has channelled income from his day job into the magazine's cash flow. Every cent from sales and advertising goes back in. They plan to increase the publication from quarterly to bi-monthly, and if they have enough subscriptions, they'll be able to pay contributors. I thought again about what I was doing in my early 20s. I was not funnelling money into a magazine to showcase the talents of my peers.

Karolien and her friends; Helen Sullivan and her friends; all the other young adults I don't know about who build things and help people: I just don't understand this generation. I'm not sure what we've done to deserve them.