American Youth
By Phil LaMarche, Random House, 2007

      Phil LaMarche has something to say about the political divide in America, but it’s not easy to determine exactly what, at least not given the evidence of his debut novel, the possibly satirical American Youth. The novel alludes to the much talked about culture war, but because LaMarche and his characters are so coy about who they are and what they believe, there are no solid conclusions to be drawn or insights to be mined from the book’s narrative. Indeed, it often seems that when he talks about ideological tensions, he’s not talking about the same tensions that everyone else is talking about; his America is curiously out of step with the America presented to us in the mainstream media, so his little fairy tale teeters on the brink of relevance.

      The book’s protagonist is a teenager named Ted – although LaMarche consistently refers to him as “the boy,” despite having given his character a perfectly functional name – and Ted lives in a small town in New Hampshire, a little community that is somehow simultaneously economically depressed and overrun with newcomers. Ted’s family is hardy the best of noble rural stock; his father is absent, forced to live hours away in order to find work, and his mother is a steadfast pioneer wife, holding down the fort while her husband is away and waiting for the day when the town’s financial fortune changes and everything goes back to the way it was before.

      Ted’s friend Terry is a wrong-side-of-the-tracks kid, and Ted occasionally ditches him to hang out with Kevin and Bobby Dennison, presumably right-side-of-the-tracks kids. One day, while hanging out at Ted’s house, Kevin and Bobby convince Ted to show them his .22 rifle. Despite being a disciplined and diligent follower of all gun safety rules and guidelines, Ted loads the rifle and leaves the room; while he’s gone, Kevin shoots Bobby.

      Things go downhill from there. First, Ted’s mom forces him to lie to the police; she thinks it’s better for her son to expose himself to a potential manslaughter charge than to confess to violating standard gun-handling procedures. Ted waits for the months-long investigation to play out, not sure if he’ll be going to high school or prison. Worse, Ted’s involvement in the firearms accident draws the attention – and admiration – of a gang of right-wing high school thugs, the American Youth, a sort of militant church youth group who vandalize the homes of people who cuss, drink, have sex or support gun control. As facist movements go, American Youth is not so bad; they’re really just trying to make the world a better place, with less cussing and drinking, and more guns. Ted is a little creeped out by them, but he hangs with them anyway. When the girlfriend of one of the Youth members decides she wants to be Ted’s girlfriend instead, however, Ted succumbs; soon Ted is doing everything that the American Youth abhor. Trouble is sure to follow.

      But it really doesn’t. The potential conflicts that LaMarche sets up never fully materialize, at least not in any dramatically satisfying way. His antagonists, the ostensibly threatening American Youth, are hardly menacing; the boys, despite their violent rhetoric, are downright cuddly. Their actions generally result in nothing more than property damage – they don’t really seem to want to hurt anyone – and even though their ideology is undeniably right-wing they are devoid of the more distasteful and troublesome viewpoints of typical right-wing extremists. Ted isn’t terribly afraid of the gang, even when he crosses them, and we readers, inevitably more sophisticated than the protagonist, are sure to be even less intimidated by them.

      The problem is that all of LaMarche’s characters are on the same side of the American political spectrum, and because the author is unwilling to pass judgment on any of them there is no enjoyable tension between them. This shortcoming becomes clear when you consider that the issue of Americans and guns is central to the novel’s plot, but the issue’s poles as presented in the book are not those of the actual gun control debate. Here, you have one side (Ted’s) that handles guns responsibly (most of the time) and the other side (Kevin Dennison’s) that doesn’t. The scary faction (American Youth) talks about guns a lot (and the mother of one of the gang members owns a gun store), but never do they use guns in their mayhem. In fact, guns are never used to intentionally inflict harm, and even the violent delinquents never consider putting a firearm to illegal use. The book’s admirable characters venerate and fetishize guns, and no one (except one caricature-like liberal teacher) distrusts them. This hardly represents the way that Americans feel about and utilize guns, and it underscores LaMarche’s failure to capture the real American political schism.

      Indeed, very little about the novel feels real. The town is populated by teenagers who seem never to have seen cable TV or the Internet, who are without senses of humor or irony, who rarely swear or think mean thoughts. All of them are good-hearted peasants, noble savages whose way of life is threatened by ill-defined outsiders, mysterious creatures who make no actual appearance in the book.

      None of it is helped by LaMarche’s unsophisticated, homey style; he has, for example, a cloying tendency to turn body parts into verbs: characters “shoulder” doors open, “fist” rocks before throwing them and “finger” all kinds of stuff.

      As political commentary, American Youth is almost frightening. In the world of the novel, right-wing extremism is a minor transgression. The strutting thugs have the right idea; they just carry it a little too far. LaMarche appears to argue – if he argues anything at all – that moderation is the key to holding conservative views. That’s fine if you’re a conservative looking for affirmation. If, however, you’re looking for a plausible and wise examination of “an America ill at ease with itself” (as the jacket copy describes the book), you should look elsewhere.

Copyright 2007 Ad Media Inc.