American Youth

I turned the pages with increasing anxiety in this gripping debut novel, "American Youth" by Phil Lamarche. Part of my mind was thinking that it should be required reading for all new parents, while the other part wanted to close it and make it all go away. The protagonist, always referred to as "the boy" in the narration, makes one bad choice after another steadily and stealthily increasing the reader's desire to make him "Grow up!" "See sense!" "Make better choices!" - we want to scream "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?" when it's clear that young people often AREN'T thinking...at least not rationally. New studies have indicated that teen-ager's brains aren't fully formed and that their capacity for rational thought often isn't mature until the early twenties. (This summer, here in Houston, there have been two very tragic accidents involving teens, cars, trains and bad choices that have claimed the lives at least six young people.) This excellent novel reminded me, yet again, how perilous those years are, in part because of the influences of our current "accept no responsibility" society and the sub-cultures that encourage teen angst rather than channeling the positives. This is a difficult book to read while it's impossible to put down. I'll be looking for Mr. Lamarche's next novel as well. Great job.

American Youth is one of those novels that seems to touch a chord with its readers--summing up all that hasn't been said about a culture and bringing to light a dirty secret everyone knows but no one had been able to put into words like this. It simultaneously manages to be ultra light and intensely heavy. The story reads quickly, forcing the reader forward, even as the sumptuous prose pulls you back to re-read, and then read again to pull out the subtle nuances, the hints and connections, and the symbols which are everywhere. Ted, the protagonist, initially known as "the boy" is small, insecure and struggling within the confines of his life even before the accident which transforms his life. The local economy is bad, and his salesman father moves 8 hours south to work while Ted and his mother wait for non-existent buyers to purchase their house so they can join him. Ted is about to start high school and in his summer break, spends time with his larger friend Terry throwing Molotov cocktails at an abandoned development and wrecking the `for sale' signs in front of his house. Ennui and discomfort surround him, and the reader immediately gets the sense that Ted is an observant boy, quiet and uncomfortable in his skin. When Ted invites his well-off neighbours, the Dennisons, over to play, the boys are obviously bored with Ted's lack of television stations, lack of soda, and lack of entertainment, so Ted allows himself to be drawn into showing them his rifle. He also allows himself to do something he shouldn't--load the gun, and then guiltily checks to if his mother is watching. In that split second, one of the brothers shoots the other one, an action which changes the direction of the book, and both opens and closes a series of doors in Ted's world. On every level, the prose in this book is superbly rendered--taut, intense, and forward moving, while at the same time retaining an almost painful sense of introspection that allows the reader to get under Ted's skin. In the lonely aftermath of an accident that leaves Ted feeling culpable, mainly because of his lie about loading the gun, Ted begins high school, where he is sought after by a group of boys who form a kind of gang which they call `American Youth.' The story pivots around Ted's coming of age as he tries to find ways to deal with his guilt, his increasing confusion towards the gang, his family, his growing sexuality, and above all, his sense of self. The morality of the book is clear and becomes clearer to Ted as the narrative develops along with his own maturity, but never does LaMarche allow his fingernail paring narrator to interrupt, nor does he ever tell the reader what to think or how to interpret events. As the gang's brutality, bigotry and anger becomes more apparent, Ted's own anger and pain rise to the fore and he has to confront the inchoate demons that torture him far more than the gang's violence. The myopic disfunctionality of Ted's world isn't a distopia. I

This is a short and very well-written novel about a few troubling months in the life of a high-school boy. The book starts off when the boy is showing off his father's gun collection to two of his friends and one of them accidentally shoots and kills the other. The boy copes with the impending legal situation, the ostracism from the other kids at school, and a multitude of other high-school issues. The thing that struck me most about the book was how real and believable the themes seemed, even as some of the situations border on satire. LaMarche obviously did his homework on a number of subjects, just to add enough detail to make it real (I even found the scene of the boy visiting the emergency room when he bit his tongue to be exactly the same as mine when it happened to me). His writing is deft and sparse. There is no fat in the sentences or in the story. There is no sense that he is trying to prove anything with his style, and he is heavy-handed with nothing. I found it all very true and refreshing. And although the writing is sparse, the themes of youth, loyalty, and clashing lifestyles feel deep without being beaten to death. LaMarche's first novel is a great modern take on the coming-of-age novel.

The influence of Cormac McCarthy is strongly, if gallingly, present in Phil LaMarche's otherwise solid debut. LaMarche opens with an epigraph from McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, a reference to scars that seems somewhat too obvious, given the main character's bad habit. LaMarche's most significant nod to McCarthy similarly, and also pointlessly, hits the reader over the head: throughout the novel, he refers to his adolescent protagonist simply as "the boy" -- much like "the kid" in Blood Meridian. Yeah, I get it: Ted is young and inexperienced, but he's also an everyman (everyboy?). These are annoying and derivative touches LaMarche need not have used, for his book would have succeeded just as well without relying on someone's else bag of tricks. In what is essentially a new take on the old coming-of-age story, Ted LeClare, a rising freshman at a big regional high school in rural New England, loads the rifle involved in an accident that leaves a friend dead. (The friend's brother actually pulls the trigger.) Ted's mother urges him to deny loading the gun, and so he does, thus inciting Ted's descent into self-mutilation, violence, sex, and drugs as he seeks some kind of redemption and searches for his identity in the wake of the tragedy. He becomes tied up with a right-wing gang called American Youth, whose members are almost cartoon-like in their philosophical mutterings about states rights and guns. And Ted must contend, as must the other characters, with his hometown's changing demographics. Although it is currently experiencing an economic downturn, new residents from Boston have been flooding into the town, transforming land into upscale housing developments and bringing their more progressive values with them. (I was reminded somewhat of Russell Banks' Affliction, in which a similar tension is at play in a rural New England town.) In short it is a recipe for disaster for a fourteen-year-old -- or anyone, for that matter. Much of the book seems very run-of-the-mill, like the cigarettes Ted sneaks or his awkward sexual encounters. But his moral and psychological development has its ups and downs and surprises, but LaMarche succeeds in making it believable. LaMarche errs in drawing so heavily from Cormac McCarthy, but his potential as a serious writer shines through. I look forward to reading him as his writing matures.

American Youth is the story of a deeply conflicted boy who struggles with the consequences of his role in a tragic firearms incident in his home. Set against an economic recession that challenges a small family's tenacity and a young boy's identity, LaMarche's novel could be called a coming-of-age story, though it would be an injustice to so quickly and neatly label a story that is a bold and memorable exploration of the darker side of the human soul. The firearms incident presents the boy with a series of moral dilemmas that makes this a refreshingly character-driven story. But it is this young boy's attempt to preserve his emotional sanity in the face of severe but realistic challenges that gives American Youth the kind of power that can change a reader's perception of what it means to be young, troubled and American. When the boy enters high school he carries with him feelings of guilt and anger that, like a loaded gun in a school locker, infuse the story with a suspense that makes this novel as much a page-turner as a literary achievement. When a notorious gang of boys accepts him and a girl associated with them begins to pay him more attention than is safe, the story takes a darker turn that givens new meaning to the word "dark." However, the narrative never wallows in these dark moments. They are there for a reason and because of that the novel's conclusion is both unforgettable and utterly appropriate. American Youth is a revealing portrait of an outsider who is fighting emotional and physical battles with himself on terrain that LaMarche convincingly and daringly explores. He uses prose that is as hard, taut and unsparing as a box of bullets, each concise sentence carrying with it a power that plants itself in the reader's imagination and stays there, trembling with possibility. Issues like teenage self-destructiveness, pubescent sexuality and identity crises are all rendered in a starkly realistic tone that is compelling, honest, accurate and, at times, brutal. Overall, American Youth is well worth reading and then reading again. A truly admirable accomplishment.