American ugly

>> Innocence is not all lost in American Youth, Phil LaMarche’s tale of rural alienation

by JULIET WATERS

American Youth opens with two boys hunting for trouble. They make their way through what remains of a forest. “The men had taken the timber of any value and only the undesirable trees remained: the young, the mangled and twisted, the rotten and sick. The boys made their way through the difficult clutter of leftover branches that now thatched the forest floor. The sun broke the sparse canopy and beat on their sweating necks.”

Yes, it beats on their necks. It beats on them again and again with all the bludgeoning force of an American metaphor. It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever taken an English course that the boys are like the young mangled trees, and the clutter is the chaos of values that is increasingly invading small North American towns. Towns that are becoming exurbs, as disaffected pilgrims from cities and suburbs build, abandon and rebuild crappy development property with the economic tide. What may come as a surprise to the jaded eyes of North American readers is how well the old ways can still be made to work.

Phil LaMarche’s debut novel sets itself down in a small New Hampshire town during an economic downturn and refuses to budge until it has gnawed every trope of traditional American fiction to the bone. Until it’s masticated every cell of Dreiser, Steinbeck and the grandsons: Banks and Lehane. Until there’s nothing left but pure story. But from this pure story, he creates something that’s been missing for a while: innocence. This is not to be confused with the naïveté that stinks up too much of American film and television, but it’s definitely not the relatively healthier stink of cynicism from the growing compost heap of unread realism.

The boys set about their business, throwing Molotov cocktails into abandoned housing projects, loading the gun in an accidental shooting and forming a gang of fundamentalist vigilantes. LaMarche records their angry stupidities with tender disassociation, focusing specifically on the story of one boy who is “falling like a homesick rock.”

“The Boy,” as he is referred to throughout, has a name, Ted (actually Theodore, which may be a slight-but-respectful nod to Dreiser’s An American Tragedy). Circumstances lead him into the arms of American Youth, a gang of neo-skinheads who champion straight-edge celibacy and are happy to beat the fuck out of anyone who doesn’t toe the line to good old-fashioned Christian-American values.

The rise of this fanatical fundamentalism is understandable given the level of alcoholism, addiction and emotional negligence that seems to lurk in every home. It’s certainly in line with the paranoia of rural parents exacerbated by the paranoia of urban parents, who have moved there, ironically, to raise their kids in a safer environment. The little schoolhouse, however, has been replaced with massive educational factories that serve several small towns. The Boy is about to start highschool in a freshman class of 600. The result is a level of alienation and fragmentation that makes inner city public schools look homey. Add to this a rural gun culture nurtured over centuries, and it’s no surprise the developments are clearing out almost as fast as they are built.

It’s a sad situation, made even sadder by the longing that LaMarche’s character clearly has to escape a cycle that’s been spinning its wheels since the first settlers broke ground in the Americas and since the first teenagers used terrorism to get attention. But if there’s any hope in this story, it’s that the longing is still there by the end of it, and that LaMarche has drawn a somewhat clearer line marking the difference between innocence protected and innocence earned

American Youth by Phil LaMarche,
Knopf, Hc, 240pp, $29.95