MAKE-BELIEVE BALLROOMS <i> by Peter J. Smith (Atlantic Monthly Press: $9.95)</i>

Re-warmed brat pack Angst . Ennui, drugs and alienation abound in yet another chronicle of life among the well-to-do but loveless kids of the Eastern Seaboard. Peter Smith’s pedestrian novel takes the form of an internal monologue--a polluted stream of consciousness that is too derivative to be interesting, but not quite terrible enough to be funny. The scene in which the narrator shaves his younger sister’s head and his older brother’s crotch may cause readers to wonder why a reviewer for the Chicago Tribune described Smith as a “younger, hipper Robert Benchley”--and why as classy a publisher as Atlantic Monthly bothered with this shopworn trash.