TODAY IS 80 YEARS SINCE Allen Ginsberg was born, and this summer marks the half- centenary of one of the defining texts of the Beat generation, his poem Howl. Happy birthday to ya, Al! Here’s hoping all those years of Buddhist chanting got you a terrific afterlife.

But if we could yank Ginsberg back to this earthly realm for a moment, what would he make of today’s young generation of literary talent? I can’t help but think he would be disappointed. The Beats were exhilarated by the present, these authors, young as they are, revel in the past. But if Ginsberg were to spend a few moments stroking his impressive beard, he might find both literary eras have something in common — naivety.

Take David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. The award-winning author of Cloud Atlas has produced a meticulous examination of a British childhood c 1982. As his teenage hero Jason struggles with a stammer, Mitchell glories in nostalgic detail, the butterscotch Angel Delight, the baked Alaska, the video game called Scrambler, boys calling each other “total gaylords”.

“Wish I could be 13 again,” Jason’s father says. “Then,” Jason thinks, “you’ve obviously forgotten what it’s like.”

Track back a year or two to Andrew O’Hagan, one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, and his novel Personality. The subject is Maria Tambini, a teenage child star growing up in late 1970s Scotland, all period references to Girl’s World dolls and Les Dawson. Before him came Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club about four teenagers growing up in 1970s Birmingham. And then there was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and The Autograph Man, both full of teenage characters surrounded by 1980s product placement.

In America, the influence of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, about his attempt to raise his brother after they were orphaned, has been enormous. In a different tradition, so have the stories of the savagely funny David Sedaris, whose adolescence in 1970s suburbia has provided material for not one but two books, and counting.

Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac wrote as adults, their faces pressed to the front windscreen of an old jalopy; Mitchell, Smith, Coe, Sedaris and others write as teenagers, looking back through the rear window of the school bus.

The Beats would have found this preoccupation with adolescent histories bizarre. Kerouac dismissed his past with hardly a parting glance in On the Road. “What is the feeling when you’re driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?” he wrote. “It’s the too huge world vaulting us, and it’s goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

Why do today’s exciting young authors hark on so about childhood? You could say that growing up in the 1980s had not been “done” before, in the same way that before Ginsberg and William Burroughs no one had so enthusiastically reported the effects of drugs. Betamax videos are to this generation what Benzedrine was to the Beats: virgin snow, albeit muddied with each new book on the same terrain.

But that is to miss the bigger point: both are actually in search of the naive, but go about it in radically different ways. The Beats were utterly sincere to the point of humourlessness, these current writers can be self-conscious and ironic to the point of disappearing up their own bottoms.

Neal Cassady, the friend and muse of the Beats (“Dean” in On the Road) advised Kerouac to “write as if he were the first person on Earth and was humbly and sincerly putting on paper that which he saw and experienced and loved and lost”.

Compare that with Eggers’s inclusion in his first book of an accounting of the way his advance was spent. Or Sedaris’s story about how his family have stopped talking to him because he will turn what they say into a story. Or with the hero of The Autograph Man trying to behave in the way “he had read about in novels”.

The Beats wrote earnestly and enthusiastically about adult experiences: sex, drugs and madness. But because of the knowingness we have accrued over the past half century their tone now seems embarrassing — adolescent even — in its lack of self-awareness. On the Road’s appeal has been getting younger. It’s now a gap year book rather than one to last a lifetime.

The new movement uses every trick to avoid this. Sophisticated techniques distance themselves from their heroes: irony, mockery, editorialising and placing them firmly in the 1970s or 1980s. To assume the portentiousness of the Beats would be cringe-worthy in our savvy, cynical age — proof of that can be found in the lamentable poetry of Pete Doherty, the Babyshambles singer and erstwhile boyfriend of Kate Moss, who seems to style himself in word, dress and behaviour on the drug-addled hep cats of the 1950s.

Isn’t it interesting that so many contemporary novelists focus on the teenage years, a time when life is so urgent and fresh? To be too sophisticated is boring, because adventures come only to those who are a little naive. It is fun to witness what happens to the foolish and out of control. Innocence is both likeable — we root for naive characters just as we enjoy learning from their mistakes — and irritating if we are exposed to it for too long (as in On the Road).

By describing adolescent experiences through an adult filter, the new movement gets to have its cake and eat it. They share the Beats’ passion for youthful exuberance and folly, but endear themselves to a mature audience. The spirit of On the Road is alive and well, but now in modern packaging. Allen Ginsberg, your work here is done.

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