TEENAGE WASTELAND: COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS IN THE 1980S AND 1990S

In Generation Ecch!, a popular satire of contemporary youth culture, Jason Cohen and Michael Krugman excerpt the promotional blurbs from several recent coming-of-age novels to uncover an intriguing trend. One critic describes Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984) as a "Catcher in the Rye for the M. B. A. set." Another labels Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero (1985) "an updated Catcher in the Rye." Cosmopolitan's book editor proves such a Catcher fan that she compares not one but two Douglas Coupland novels to that classic. "Having called Coupland's first book [Generation X (1991)] a Catcher in the Rye for our times," she writes of his second, Shampoo Planet (1993), "I repeat myself" (97). One could cite a plethora of other examples. The back cover of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1987) likens that best-selling novel not only to Catcher but to This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and On the Road. Another reviewer describes David Leavitt's The Lost Language of the Cranes (1986) as a "gay Catcher in the Rye." And Simon and Schuster's publicity division promoted Blake Nelson's Girl (1994) as "a female Catcher in the Rye for the 'Grunge' generation."

Given Catcher's reputation as the quintessential American coming-of-age novel, it is not surprising that publishers would rush to equate new entries in the genre to Salinger's classic tale of adolescent anguish.(n1) For Cohen and Krugman, however, the comparisons reveal just how stylized and derivative stories of disaffected youth have grown in the decades since Holden Caulfield first railed against adult phonies. Rather than offer "any sharp insight or affecting emotional glimpses into the human condition," these works present "portraits of solipsism, blankness and reticence that are themselves solipsistic, blank and reticent." Evoking aimlessness and detachment, they "consistently attempt to portray a generation to itself without any special insight, artistic integrity or provocative narrative" (117). Their opinion is by no means unique. Bruce Bawer complains that the aforementioned works "transform [Holden's] profound, embattled despair [...] into something very superficial, solipsistic, and modish" (19). John W. Aldridge likewise dismisses their detachment as an egregious aesthetic miscalculation, for "a book about young people who cannot think or feel had better provide some clue as to the reason they cannot think or feel" (154).

Critics are correct to note that today's fictional teens are a breed apart from predecessors like Holden, Amory Blaine, or Esther Greenwood. Neither rebels with a cause nor "good bad boys" and girls, they are not, as Leslie Fiedler once described Holden's literary siblings, "crude and unruly in [their] beginnings, but endowed by [their] creator with an instinctive sense of what is right" (270). Instead of confronting adult hypocrisy with unfettered idealism, these adolescents are emotionally and morally obtuse. As Henry A. Giroux observes, they seem "uniquely 'alien,' 'strange,' and disconnected," defeated at a premature age by a "world in which chance and randomness rather than struggle, community, and solidarity drive their fate" (Fugitive 34). Aloof to affect and agency, fictional youth--white youth in particular(n2)--constitute a species of walking dead, not unlike those "undone" habitues of Eliot's The Waste Land. Rather than condemn the teenage wasteland depicted in contemporary literature as "modish" or trendy, we ought to ask why this image has become the trend. According to Giroux, representations of white youth as "dull, aimless, and shorn of any idealism" are pervasive today because they excite the "politics of despair," the process by which the social causes of adolescent anomie are identified, debated, and ideologically articulated in reformist agendas.(n3) Sensational stories of "youth gone wild" appeal to "dominant fears of a loss of moral authority" by crediting the adolescent condition to a crumbling infrastructure of familial and institutional oversight once said to regulate the passage into adulthood. Often oblivious to issues of class stratification, economic displacement, and racial conflict, these narratives posit "a utopian rendering of middle-class family values" as a cure-all. In doing so, they prove unlikely allies to cultural conservatives who insist that a simple reconstitution of patriarchal authority will resolve the crisis of youth (Giroux, Channel 47-51).

From a literary-studies perspective, these novels' complicity in the politics of youth despair has affected a striking transformation in the genre's social function. Traditionally, adolescent fictions like Catcher and The Bell Jar caution against the stifling conformity, empty materialism, and false piety of the bourgeois home. Up through the 1970s, teenage resistance to social authority was such a pervasive motif in American fiction that the adolescent struggle for autonomy embodied for many critics the national myth of self-reliance.(n4) In contemporary novels, however, youth's disaffected disposition is credited not to the oppressiveness of adult authority but to a lack of it. David Leavitt, one of the earliest writers identified as a spokesman for post-baby boomers, first made this point explicit in a 1985 Esquire essay in which he ascribed the "detached, ironic voice" of his contemporaries to an ungratified "need [...] for settledness, for security, for home" ("New Lost Generation" 94). The concern with the dissipating domestic traditions evident in works like Less Than Zero, Generation X, and Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992) suggests how their politics of despair ultimately culminates in a politics of repair. By implicitly endorsing an idealized, nostalgic vision of family, these narratives break with the genre's antiauthoritarian tradition and re-script the uses of adolescent disaffection. Whereas the teenager once intuitively asserted youth's moral supremacy over their elders, today's aimless, amoral kids cry out for adult intervention as they beg entry into the shelters of home.

In the penultimate chapter of Catcher, Holden declines to run away to California to spare his younger sister Phoebe, who insists on joining him, from the cynicism and despair he suffers. He does so because he understands that if he allows Phoebe to follow him westward he fails his dream of protecting her innocence; instead of preventing her terrible fall into adulthood, he will be as guilty of pushing her over the edge of childhood as the anonymous "pervert" who scribbles profanity on her elementary school walls. Thus, to save her, he must sacrifice his passionate disdain for adult phonies and submit to the indignity of their "asking me if I'm going to apply myself" (213). Through this concluding gesture, Catcher insists that adolescent rebellion is guided by moral intent and is not symptomatic of the narcissism and selfishness associated with this stage of life. Far from idiosyncratic, the ethical challenge that Holden faces is a stock climax of coming-of-age novels, as obvious in overt Salinger homages--John Knowles' A Separate Peace (1961), for example--as in juvenile-delinquent melodramas like Evan Hunter's The Blackboard Jungle (1954).(n5) As Patricia Meyer Spacks argues, the intuitive morality that this plot ascribes to its teen protagonists implies that "if the young [...] demonstrate their inability to accept the code of civilized society, the fault must lie not in them but in those who have failed to provide acceptable values." By extension, youth's rituals of disaffection are not expressions of antisocial behavior but confirm rather that they are "engag[ed] in an arduous quest, searching, seeking, grasping, testing in an effort to find the proper [moral] course" in life (265,269).

As Spacks correctly adds, the coming-of-age novel's tradition of endorsing adolescent disaffection as a necessary corrective to corrupt adult values did not arise in a literary vacuum. Its roots lie in an interdisciplinary definition of youth inaugurated with the publication of psychologist G. Stanley Hall's epic study Adolescence (1904).(n6) Victorian contemporaries advocated a rigorous policing of youth to ensure social continuity, but Hall ameliorated disaffection by arguing that it registers the continued viability of what David Bakan calls the "promise of adolescence," the social contract that guarantees that "if a young person does all the things he [sic] is 'supposed to do' during his adolescence, he will then realize success, status, income, power" (989). In Hall's logic, if youth is alienated, society should reassess its values and recalibrate the institutional systems that dispense the rewards of growing up. Although Hall himself was largely forgotten by the 1940s, his thesis found renewed expression in studies like Erik Erikson's Childhood and Society (1950) and Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1960), both of which portray adolescent rebellion as a conscientious guard against attenuating values.(n7) Thus, by the time that literary critics addressed the sudden slew of Catcher-esque novels in the late 1950s, a sufficient myth of adolescence existed to shape conceptions of the group's social function. Youth was not just a period in the life cycle, but what Spacks calls a "standard of value" that measures "passion, imagination, and vitality" (235). Although a few commentators-Fiedler and Ihab Hassan most prominently-questioned the glorification of adolescence, most echoed Hall by suggesting that motifs of teen discontent cautioned adults against reveling too intently in material pleasures.(n8) In essence, commentators perceived the coming-of-age story as addressing a dual audience. It provided young people with a network of identification for establishing a sense of generational affinity and also reminded parents of their obligation to teach youth the dangers of excessive individualism and empty upward mobility.

Strikingly, contemporary novels break with that tradition. Today's fictional teens are not alienated by their extra-sensitive perception of adult inauthenticity but by a keen awareness of their incapacity to feel. "I don't want to care," says Clay, the narrator of Less Than Zero. "It'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care" (205). "My life [...] has been very stale and colorless," confesses a homicidal nineteen -year-old in The Secret History. "The world has always been an empty place to me. [...] I felt dead in everything I did" (448-49). In Eric Bogosian's subUrbia (1994), a kid named Jeff rails against his apathy, only to acknowledge its narcotic comfort: "Nothing ever fucking changes," he complains. "Fifty years from now, we'll all be dead and there'll be new people standing here [in front of the local 7-Eleven] drinking beer and eating pizza. [...] It's all so fucking futile!" Bored by the tirade, Jeff's buddy Tim asks, "If it's so fucking futile what the fuck are you so fucking upset about, fuckhead?" To which Jeff can only reply, "I'm fucking alienated" (12). The aura of oppressive paralysis arises from a dual renunciation of effort that here verges on the parodic. Although Tim's cadenced profanity bleeds Jeff's ire of energy by turning his angry expletive into an empty interjection, Jeff refuses to try to escape the suburban "tarpit of stupidity" trapping him. Challenged to account for his sudden burst of passion, he describes his anguish in such cliched terms that the line begs to be read as ironic, as his knowing acquiescence to indifference.

Countless other examples confirm that when confronted with ethical choices, fictional teens retreat into what Giroux calls a "comatose" posture of "blank, dull detachment" (Fugitive 34). In Nelson's Girl, the narrator Andrea Marr describes losing her virginity with passive precision:

And I just laid there and he got on top of me and tried to put it in and it felt really strange at first, like I didn't quite know where it was. But then he got it in. And I just held my breath and then he started doing it and it felt so weird. And I waited for something to happen but nothing really did except he made these little grunting noises. [...] And I was sort of describing it to myself in my mind and also to Darcy but then he stopped and it was over. And I just laid there staring up at the stars and the tops of the trees and I thought, My life, my real life, has just now begun. (61; original italics)

Yet Andrea's life has not really begun, for sex neither makes her more articulate about pleasure nor more wary of the predatory boys who try to sleep with her.(n9) As the rote repetition of "and" implies, it just happens--losing her virginity is just another event that passes with flat, dull determinism.

Again, the critical tendency has been to denounce this type of detached style for lacking the rhetorical "bravado, irreverence, and slangy profanity" that, for Philip Beidler, are indicative of youth's "search for some empowerment of voice" in the fiction of the 1950s and 1960s (176). The point, however, is not that writers like Nelson are incapable of imitating the fecund verbal energy of their predecessors but that their protagonists see little use in such a quest.(n10) As Beidler documents, Catcher, On the Road, and cult classics like Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1965) all employ iconoclastic narrative devices (whether hypnotic sentence structures or jarring juxtapositions of formal and informal language) to suggest that "acts of imagination" and "inspired modes of thinking [...] might truly change the world" (2). Thus, in On the Road, Kerouac exploits the conjunctive force of "and," as when Dean Moriarty describes his father to Sal Paradise: "Oh, man, I have to tell you, NOW, I have IT--I have to tell you the time my father and I and a pisspoor bum from Larimer Street took a trip to Nebraska. [...] And how we made [flyswatters ...]. And my old man in those days was always singing 'Hallelujah, I'm a bum, bum again.' And man, now listen to this. [...]" (171). Such concatenated clauses project the exuberant mobility of Dean and Sal's cross-country journey of self-discovery, a picaresque improvisation constrained only by the topmost velocity at which they can travel and talk. But to insist that contemporary youths lack faith in the transformational power of imaginative acts, the style in Girl must serve less as a vehicle of spontaneous self-determination than of Andrea's impassivity.(n11) Aware that she makes love with this boy for "no reason," yet incapable of stopping the seduction, she escapes by imagining herself describing the scene. Pretending she is an observer rather than a participant, she avoids the emotional entanglements of sex. Nelson's stylized syntax thus conveys how Andrea resigns herself to the sequentiality of the moment, letting events unfold without intervention or resistance. Her spectatorial ambivalence may not enhance her subjective understanding, but at least, she supposes, it will deliver her to an anterior time when she can "be alone and think about things and try to get used to myself, my new non-virgin self" (61).

Of course, not all recent youth novels employ as disengaged a narrative style as Girl. Yet even texts that do strive for adolescent irreverence disassociate themselves from the self-invention promised by the youth styles of earlier decades. When, for example, Holden refuses to embellish his tale with "David Copperfield kind of crap" (1) about "lousy" childhoods and preoccupied parents, Salinger encourages young people to eschew the plot conventions of Dickensian melodrama in assaying their disaffection.(n12) As many a first-generation reader of Catcher has recalled, the novel's most compelling aspect was its audacious voice, which seemed "to yank literature away from those who pronounced it lit-er-a-tour" to become "a doppelganger-in-residence for an entire generation" (Pinsker 21). By contrast, when McInerney begins his adolescent expose Story of My Life (1988) with a cliched bit of teenspeak--"I'm like, I don't believe this shit" (1), he laments (or perhaps ridicules) his narrator's lack of lyrical resource. Unlike Holden, Alison Poole does not speak for her generation as much as she is spoken for by it. Her pastiche of sitcom slang, MTVisms, and chic drug phraseology revels in its facility for hip metaphors while boasting of its utter aloofness to emotional affect. Recounting her destructive descent into the New York nightclub scene, Alison casually speaks of "looking for AIDS in all the right places" (99) and describes her abortion as "hoovering [her] insides out" (181). However self-recriminating her sarcasm may seem, her style does not achieve what David Foster Wallace claims is the traditional result of irony, a "creative instantiation of deviance from bogus values." Instead, Alison's irreverence toward her well-being exaggerates Andrea's spectatorial narrative stance in Girl; it allows her to comment on events rather than take responsibility for them. Whereas Andrea wants only to get by, Alison's grating glibness betrays a constant need to congratulate herself for what Wallace calls the "canny superiority" of her sardonic detachment. Assuming a "numb blank bored demeanor," she insists that her posture of emotional "flatness, numbness, and cynicism" marks her "stand-out transcendence--[her] flatness is a transcendence of melodrama, numbness transcends sentimentality, and cynicism announces that [she] knows the score, was last naive about something at maybe like age four" (Wallace, "E Unibus" 180-81).(n13) As Alison's flip voice makes clear, she believes herself too cool to care.

In many novels, this stylistic detachment amplifies the shock effect intended by the dramatic depiction of teen amorality. That is, the narrational tone of disconnection enhances the thematic supposition that modern youths are so unfeeling that they can indulge in random acts of violence without registering the consequences. Lacking ethical discrimination, contemporary teens find little purpose in antisocial behavior beyond fleeting titillation; previous generations of teens envisioned sex and drugs as forms of gnosis that transcended the sterile dictates of adult culture, whereas these young people desire only a reprieve from boredom.(n13) In some instances, the inclination takes a bizarre theatrical turn. In Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh, for example, a trio of youth choreograph the mating of a trio of pit bulls with an estrous dog they tend for a summer. Heckling the "distinctive near-catatonic state" the female pet enters as each satyric male dog takes its turn allows the boys to enact their hatred for the animal's owner, a stereotyped "elephantine" shrew who fancies her daughter too cultivated to fraternize with them (76-77). According to Giroux, such elaborately staged expressions of youth aggression imply that teens are victims of "a culture in which human life is experienced as a voyeuristic seduction, a video game, good for passing time and diverting oneself from the pain of the moment" (Fugitive 35). These works thus exploit the fear that youth's emotional detachment can grow so extreme that they lose all empathy and devolve into creatures of pure sensation.(n14)

This fear is an obvious theme of The Secret History, in which a group of honor students at a prestigious northeastern university kill a bystander while enacting a Greek bacchanal. Far from feeling guilty, Donna Tartt's precocious teens are invigorated by homicide and repeatedly describe the scene of death with casual indifference. According to Henry, the group's leader, killing is a simple "redistribution of matter" (278) that teaches him he can do whatever he wishes without punishment. The one killer with a conscience admits that "it's a terrible thing, what we did," but his regret is hardly compassionate: "I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It's a shame" (180). The intended shock for the reader arises here from the self-awareness of the young adults' inability to feel remorse. When police question the clique, the narrator, Richard, contrasts their numbness to cinematic representations of guilt and confession: "If this was a movie, we'd all be fidgeting and acting really suspicious" (297). Instead, they are able to conceal their crime because their nonplused demeanor arouses little attention from the authorities. Literate in their lack of affect, The Secret History's characters speak of murder with the same dispassionate pedantry that they bring to their literary pursuits.

The violence of Pittsburgh and History pales in comparison to the unrelenting parade of drug use, rape, snuff films, and male prostitution in Less Than Zero. In chapter after chapter, Clay claims to "want to see the worst," as he hopes to discover some form of amorality to which society has not acclimated him. In the book's most notorious chapters, he and his friends discover a dead body in an alleyway. When a girl asks whether they should call the police, another teen asks "What for?" A third youth finds the scene amusing and begins to giggle, and yet another inserts a cigarette in the corpse's mouth. When their discovery loses its fascination, they repair to the home of a local drug dealer, who promises a sight that will "blow [their] minds" (188). That sight turns out to be a heroin-addled twelve-year-old girl tied naked to a bed, who the dealer plans to sodomize before his friends' eyes. Like Tartt's Henry, the rapist justifies his actions by claiming that "if you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it." Although Clay halfheartedly tries to dissuade him by arguing that "you don't need anything [...] you have everything," the dealer responds by boasting that he does not "have anything to lose" (190-91).(n15) Disgusted, Clay attempts to flee the scene but is detained by one of the teenagers from the alley, who now busies himself by playing a video game. "Hey, where are you going?" the other boy asks. "I bet you're gonna check out that body again, right?" The concatenation of the corpse and the incapacitated girl with the video game offers an obvious (if not heavy-handed) image of youth's spectatorial detachment. Although only hinting at a causal link between teens' empathic obtuseness and their television viewing, the scenes nevertheless insist that young people experience life as voyeurs. Emotionally inert, they find their feeling aroused only by the most sensational of spectacles. As a result, they are compelled to prowl scenes of decadence, desperate for the one stimulus that will relieve their stupor.

Significantly, the dead teenage body in Zero is a recurring motif in the genre. When The Secret History's killers are forced to murder one of their own to prevent detection, they stare in fascination at their friend's corpse. Richard again compares the sight to watching a movie: "I marvel at how detached [the sight of the corpse] is in viewpoint, eccentric in detail, largely devoid of emotional power. [...] I watch it all happen quite calmly-without fear, without pity, without anything but a kind of stunned curiosity--so the impression of the event is burned indelibly upon my optic nerves, but oddly absent from my heart" (250). A teenage body likewise dramatizes youth's emotional inertia in subUrbia, which ends with Jeff and his pals discovering a friend dead from alcohol poisoning. The tragedy should compel them to repair the wastage of their lives; instead they deny any relevance and gawk at the body as though it were a mannequin. Their callous response enrages Norman, the immigrant owner of the convenience store where the body is discovered, who voices the play's indictment of this generation: "What is wrong with you?! Can you tell me? What?! What?! You don't know! Throw it all away! You throw it all away!" (122). Significantly, Jeff and his friends do not respond to this charge; the curtain closes on Bogosian's drama with the teenagers blinking in ambivalence.

According to Charles R. Acland, such scenes are prevalent because they encapsulate the moral of today's adolescent fiction: "The image of the body [...] is the ultimate expression of the waste of these young lives. The remains [...] remind [readers] metaphorically of the marginal differences between the dead and the living (dead) teens. The aestheticized presence of the corpse is the spectacle of wasted youth, activating both terror and pleasure, danger and desire" (127).(n16) By symbolizing the emotional and moral detachment of youth, the dead teenager demands that readers acknowledge the postlapsarian tragedy of modern adolescence. Indeed, the motif helps advance the idea that contemporary youth are more lost than previous lost generations. Lest the point pass unnoticed, Less Than Zero's jacket copy announces it with crude, misogynistic hyperbole: The story of today's youth is "a harrowing yet poignant indictment of our times" that "makes Jack Kerouac and his Beat Generation seem like pussies."

Beyond this facade of sensationalism, however, the narrational agency of the novels is not as disengaged as the characters. However stylized their disaffected tone, the texts lay blame for the adolescent condition squarely on the shoulders of parents. Yet unlike their predecessors, contemporary coming-of-age narratives do not denigrate adult authority but express rather an overt nostalgia for it. Typically in Catcher and its descendants, adults serve as foils for teenage nobles crusading against enculturated hypocrisies. One thinks of The Bell Jar's Dr. Nolan, who betrays Esther's trust by subjecting her to electroshock therapy, or Mrs. Robinson in Charles Webb's The Graduate, whose alcoholism and adultery reveal the corruption festering behind the veneer of middle-class respectability. Others--like Mr. Ferrenby, the rotund businessman who lectures Amory Blaine on the benevolence of capitalism in Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise--are didactic, pompous, even smug in their preceptorial rectitude. Insisting on the eminence of hard work, family fealty, and religious piety, such adults enable social controls that repress individual freedoms.(n17) In contemporary works, however, youth do not rebel or struggle against aged adult cants but bewail their disappearance. Instead of striving to escape the constraints of parental policing, teens now romanticize that oversight as the very source of security they have been denied. As Thomas Doherty suggests of a similar trend in youth films, parents today "are more likely to be condemned for being self-centered, weak, and uncertain than for being overbearing, intrusive, or present." If the cry of the teenager in the 1950s and 1960s was "'You're tearing me apart!' the cry of the modern teen is 'You're leaving me alone!'" (237).

That cry is evident in Less Than Zero whenever Clay tries to shock his parents into disciplining him. At one point, he confesses his cocaine habit to his mother, but she turns up the volume on the radio (25). A lunch with his estranged father inspires similar denial: "I didn't quite hear that," the father pretends when Clay speaks openly of his drug abuse (43). Adult indifference turns more malicious when the boy visits his patronizing psychiatrist, who proves absurdly disinterested in his patient's problems. As Clay begs for the very attention he assumed he was purchasing ("What about me?" he demands), the doctor dismisses his emotional problems as banal: "Don't be so mundane," he responds when the boy blames his depression on his parents' self-absorption (123). Other adults are so removed from their children's lives that when one addict is asked where his parents are, he cynically responds, "Does it make any difference?" (55). To emphasize the aura of victimization, Ellis concludes the narrative with a vision of suburban infanticide. As Clay listens to a song by the punk rock group X, he is haunted by "images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children" (207-08). Although its significance is not elaborated, Clay's cannibalistic dream clearly credits youth's alienation to adult abandonment. The kids are being eaten alive, the novel claims, by their parents' selfishness and narcissism.

The Secret History also blames teen disaffection on untrustworthy authority figures. When their mentor Julian discovers that his proteges are cold-blooded killers, Tartt's teens assume he will never turn them over to the police because "he loves us." Yet Julian's devotion proves illusory, for he abandons them out of fear for his life. Shocked, the students are reminded of how their own parents have similarly abandoned them, and they express their betrayal in filial terms: "I loved him more than my own father," admits Henry in an uncharacteristically emotional moment. "I loved him more than anyone in the world" (472). Julian's complicity is further underscored when, ostensibly to protect the group's secret, Henry commits suicide. Richard is haunted by the vanity that crosses Henry's face as he pulls the trigger: "His expression was one of rapt concentration, of triumph, almost a high diver rushing to the end of the board." He knows, moreover, what motivates that haughtiness: "I think he felt the need to make a noble gesture, something to prove to us and to himself that it was in fact possible to put those high cold principles which Julian had taught us to use. Duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice" (490). Among recent novels, The Secret History is most adamant in crediting teen amorality to adult ineptitude, for Tartt's characters are impishly condescending toward the sorts of mass-culture amusements (rock music, recreational drugs) ordinarily blamed for corrupting youth. Regardless of their high-culture pretensions, their criminal instincts arise from their elders' failure to empathize with them rather them inculcate them in "high cold principles."

In other novels, disaffected youth attempt to transcend their anomie and repair family relations. Throughout Chabon's Pittsburgh, Artie Bechstein strives to win the affection of his errant father, a gangster whose criminal interests remove him from his son's life. Although clearly modeled on the search for old Dean Moriarty in On the Road, Artie's picaresque is not a mythic-minded quest for assimilation into the godhead that Dean's father represents. All Artie wants is the love he was deprived of by his mother's premature death. And yet each time he manages to rendezvous with the older man, Artie is reduced to tears by his disinterest. Finally, when his father fails to rescue him from a police beating during an arrest for a petty mischief, Artie refuses to see him, knowing that "if [his father] stayed long enough [in the boy's hospital room], it would be [Artie] who ended up apologizing" (291). Youth's impulse to forgive and even compensate for parental failure is an important motif of the genre: It demonstrates the extent to which teenagers are willing to maintain a sense of family connection. Ultimately, however, Artie abandons the relationship and departs for Europe, resolving never to contact his father again because "one can learn [...] to father oneself" (295). The novel thus insists that although the older generation neglects its family obligations, youth is committed to cultivating domestic security, even if it must be established among peers rather than parents.

Expatriation also soothes the wound of familial estrangement in John Burnham Schwartz's Bicycle Days (1989). Alienated from squabbling parents who constantly air their marital dissatisfactions to their offspring, Alec Burton escapes the pain of their impending divorce by relocating to Japan. There he finds that patriarchal family traditions supply the structure and security his real home no longer affords: "This was his family--a second family," Schwartz writes, describing Alec's bliss at discovering the domestic tranquility he has dreamed of since childhood. "His Japanese parents stayed home most of the time, as though neither of them had a job at all. And no one ever mentioned how different he looked from everyone else. Not a single word about it" (71). For Alec, expatriation is not an act of disaffiliation, as it is for the lost generation of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Rather than an escape from puritanical mores, foreign cultures provide youth an environment in which they can "get hold of this feeling that [they are] finally starting to belong to something, to some people" (193).

Coupland's Generation X employs another unconventional image to convey youth's need to "belong to something." Since its 1991 publication, the novel has been widely credited for popularizing the image of post-baby boomers as "an X generation-purposefully hiding itself" in cynicism and irony, "liv[ing] life as a succession of isolated cool moments" to assuage its emotional insecurities (56). Ryan Moore summarizes the critical consensus when he argues that Coupland's characters are beleaguered by a "postmodern crisis of affectivity" as they "attempt to gain a narrative foothold on their own lives and discover some source of 'real' meaning. [...] They seek to shed their skins and achieve a transitory moment of salvation and transcendence from some 'authentic' yet unnameable force that will lift them out of everyday life, yet they can go no further than to divorce action and belief and are thus stranded between ironic distance and affective investment" (256-57). Few critics recognize, however, that Coupland names this "unnameable" force young people seek by demonstrating their commitment to community. Like Less Than Zero, Generation X indicts parents for reveling in material diversions rather than fostering family. A young waitress even describes the elder generation's voracious materialism in dream imagery comparable to Ellis's closing nightmare: "I feel like I'm watching this enormous dinner table surrounded by hundreds of greedy little children who are so spoiled, and so impatient, that they can't even wait for their food to be prepared. They have to reach for live animals placed on the table and suck the food right out of them" (9). In a later chapter called "Eat Your Parents," another character insists that youth can survive only by reversing the consumption metaphor: "I suggest you do this with your parents. Eat them. Accept them as part of getting you here, and get on with life" (85).

Yet Coupland's characters are incapable of "getting on" until they can establish the communal interchange denied them by parental neglect. Although they pass much of the novel creating camaraderie by confiding their life stories, their chronic defensiveness prevents them from truly feeling secure in their generational solidarity. Their longing for unconditional acceptance is achieved only in the book's peculiar final scene. Pulling off the highway to watch a rare white egret, the narrator Andy is suddenly "dog-piled by an instant family" composed of "mentally retarded young teenagers," who offer "their adoring, healing, uncritical embrace, each member wanting to show their affection more than the other." The learning disability of these young people is an odd metaphor for the lack of self-consciousness that allows them to express affection openly. "The crush of love" that they give Andy is "unlike anything [he] had ever known," for his own parents were "never a 'hugging family." "I, in fact, have no memory of having once been hugged by a parental unit. [...] No, I think psychic dodge ball would probably better define our family dynamic" (174). In the "warm assault" of the teenagers' embraces, however, he finds momentary respite from his loneliness. By ending on this optimistic note, the story assures readers that young people know what they most want in life: the accepting arms of family.

In still other novels, such desires are articulated stylistically rather than dramatically, often through direct addresses to truant parents. Throughout Story of My Life, Alison interrupts her narration with satirical asides aimed at her father. In the book's opening passage, he uses Alison's college tuition to fund a fling with a new girlfriend: "He's bought this new bimbo who's a year younger than me a 450 SL convertible--always gone for the young ones, haven't we, Dad?--plus her own condo" (1). Later she describes his meager contribution to her education: "He sent me a check for five hundred dollars--like wow, thanks Dad--but that was gone before I'd even cashed it" (168). On the surface, of course, these asides are sarcastic denunciations of his shoddy parental performance. And yet the interjections also serve the basic narratorial function of establishing the text's implied audience. However her father may try to slip to the margins of her story, those comments identify him as its central narratee and thus keep him implicated in the plot. In essence, the invocations mark Alison's inability to sever that relationship. While reminding parents of their duty to remain engaged in their children's lives, the device allows McInerney to demonstrate youth's willingness to assume custodianship of the family bond. Alison needs her father's guidance, and to win it, she is willing to fabricate his presence through a rhetorical technique.

This need is even more evident in Jill Eisenstadt's From Rockaway (1987), which concludes with a high-school dropout's letter to his long-departed father: "Dear Sir, Dear Mr. Ray, Father, Dad," the missive begins. "Hello, hello out there. How are you?" Rather than attack his father for abandoning him, the boy offers forgiveness and assures his father that he wishes only to share the details of his childhood--if only so he can understand himself why he suffers so much indirection. "The important thing is that you don't freak out, thinking I'm going to come looking for you. I won't, ever," he promises (211). Ultimately, the boy declines to mail the note, fearing his father's nonresponsiveness will subject him to further disappointment. Like Alison, he understands he will find more comfort in an imagined correspondence. As evidence of a yearning for familial contact, the direct addresses to parents in both Rockaway and Story reveal, according to Acland, how adolescent fictions "always in some manner call out to the world of the adult" (117). Indeed, the invocations are a literal expression of the "plea" inherent in all coming-of-age stories "for that guiding hand that demonstrates the method of integration back into the realm of normal youth, which in turn signifies the easy flow toward adulthood" (121).

The persistent motif of the broken family in these works suggests the extent to which, as David Leavitt writes, post-baby boom authors define the "crucial journey" of adolescence not as "the voyage out but the voyage back." In a New York Times Book Review essay, Leavitt notes how pervasively his peers depict teens "not [as] explorers" but as "settlers, determined to find in their adulthood the stability that eluded them in childhood" by "returning to the valuing of marriage and family" ("New Voices" 26-27).(n18) His survey of post-1960s adolescent fiction, which cites many texts not examined here, provides further evidence of a decisive shift in the genre's ethos. To whatever degree they sensationalize youth's disaffection, coming-of-age narratives are now more likely to idealize adult authority rather than challenge or critique it. Although inciting the politics of despair, these works offer an agenda of repair that is appealing for its very simplicity: To redeem young people from their malaise, we need only reinvest in the value of parental authority and discipline.

Yet the danger of the simplicity of that solution is obvious. By attributing youth anomie exclusively to domestic discord, the genre risks oversimplifying the conditions that teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s face. To be sure, this danger is not unique to literature. As Acland argues, discursive estimations of today's youth are virtually uniform in their tendency to nostalgize patriarchal authority:

The moral panic concerning youth has reached the level of common sense; it is suffused throughout civil society, and, importantly, has become central in the structuring of a particular moment of social logic. The constitution of this popular sense of crisis comes to pass in the light of a complex and multiply composed national program that arranges itself around the 'decomposition' of the traditional family. (143)

The popular reception of these novels further illustrates the extent to which this "program" determines their interpretation. A recent spate of generational exposes, including Generation Ecch!, Bill Strauss and Neil Howe's 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? (1993), and Geoffrey T. Holtz's Welcome to the Jungle: The Why Behind Generation X (1995), all mine the work of Ellis, Coupland, Tartt, and others to support their thesis that post-baby boomers are committed to re-establishing the family as the guarantor of the adolescent paysage moralisee. In such studies, Acland notes, the "violence, nihilism, and 'refusal'" dramatized in a Less Than Zero or Generation X "proclaim the loss of a particular vision of social continuity symbolized by the family and hence are readily available to demonstrate the importance of prudence, tradition, and caution" (144).(n19)

The peculiar despair-repair formula evident in these coming-of-age novels suggests that the genre faces a decisive moment in its evolution. If it is to avoid sociological simplification--what a less generous critic like Holden would probably call "that David Copperfield kind of crap"--it must redefine its constituent theme of intergenerational conflict to reflect the broader transformations currently affecting the family. That is, rather than condemn parents as self-absorbed and neglectful, it must engage what Giroux calls the "larger set of postmodern cultural conditions" that teens now face, including the "general loss of faith in the modernist narratives of work and emancipation; the recognition that the indeterminacy of the future warrants confronting and living in the immediacy of experience; [and] an acknowledgment that homelessness as a condition of randomness has replaced the security, if not misrepresentation, of home as a source of comfort and security" (Fugitive 31).(n21) Only then will the genre attain the compelling complexity of such recent nonfiction works as William Finnegan's Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country (1998). Instead of attributing the "peculiar, morale-sapping toxicity" of adolescent disaffection to "a hapless abdication of parental roles and family obligations by adults who themselves never grew up" (xvii), Cold New World assesses the post-1960s economic upheavals that have redefined those roles and obligations. Examining how a multicultural array of families from New Haven, Connecticut, to Antelope Valley, California, has been affected by a dwindling labor market and steady deflation of real wages since the 1970s, Finnegan argues that adolescents have grown "harder" in accordance with the increasingly "harder" world they inhabit. And yet, on a more hopeful note, the youths he interviews also display a "great unsatisfied hunger for narratives that may help explain the deep, diffuse crises that they and their communities seem to be in" (xviii). It is this hunger that one wishes current adolescent fictions would more actively feed. Having exploited the power of sensationalism and nostalgia, the genre must now transcend its teenage wasteland aesthetic to acknowledge the diverse practices by which youth actively engage the conditions affecting their generation. Only then will the coming-of-age novel itself come of age.

NOTES
(n1.) Despite the genre's popularity, there remains a surprising paucity of criticism on the coming-of-age novel. What little exists is largely thematic, documenting the "conflicts, insecurities and uncertainties [that] stem from the conflicts between generations in a changing society, sexual frustrations arising out of physical maturation and societal restrictions, difficulties in emancipation from parents, inconsistencies in authority relationships, and discontinuities in socialization patterns" (Kiell 17). Encyclopedic surveys by Witham (covering 1920-1960) and DeMarr and Bakerman (1960-1980) classify hundreds of examples according to these recurring issues but offer little insight into the historical construction of adolescence.

(n2.) I focus here on an admittedly circumscribed set of texts about white suburban youth for two reasons: First, multicultural fictions about growing up--examples include Trey Ellis's Platitudes (1988), Darius James's Negrophobia (1992), Banana Yoshimoto's Lizard (1994), or Junot Diaz's Drown (1996)--typically posit the family as an obstacle to self-definition and cultural assimilation and do not idealize parental authority as Less Than Zero and similar works do. Second, because the multicultural works lack that nostalgia for adult oversight, they are largely excluded from the historical construction of contemporary youth. That is, the plots of these novels resemble Catcher: Their protagonists strike out from home to establish autonomous identities; they do not invoke middle-class family values as the cure for youth disaffection. As a result, they are not celebrated as articulating the voice of the post-1960s generation. For an introduction to young authors who do explore their generation's multicultural experience, see anthologies by Liu and Wexler and Hulme.

(n3.) A central thesis of cultural studies is that youth provides metaphors through which debates over cultural change are staged. Hebdige offers the best-known formulation of this idea: Adolescents enter the public eye "only when [their] presence is a problem, or is regarded as a problem. More precisely, the category 'youth' gets mobilized [...] at those times when young people make their presence felt by 'going out of bounds,' by resisting through rituals, striking bizarre attitudes, breaking rules, breaking bottles, windows, heads, issuing rhetorical challenges to the law" (17-18). The most extensive study of the "moral panics" that youth subcultures incite is Policing the Crisis (Hall et al.), which argues that social institutions do not simply react to teen deviance but "are active in defining situations, in selecting targets, in initiating 'campaigns,' in structuring these campaigns, in selectively signifying their actions to the public at large, in legitimating their actions through the accounts of situations which they produce." Although youth defiance becomes an occasion for insisting on the necessity of social controls over the maturation process, "it is part of the paradox that they also, advertently and inadvertently, amplify the deviancy they seem absolutely committed to controlling" (52). For an overview of cultural analyses of youth by Hall, Hebdige, and others, see Acland 29-42.

(n4.) Booker offers a valuable survey of literary historians such as Fiedler, Hassan, and R. W. B. Lewis, who in the 1950s defined "the typical hero of American fiction" as "a wide-eyed, innocent new Adam," a "self-willed orphan who had adopted the spirit of the American experiment by rebelliously cutting himself off from his past" (1-2). See in particular 20-37.

(n5.) In the concluding chapters of Peace, students stage a military-style inquisition to judge the complicity of the narrator Gene in the maiming of his friend Phinneas in a tree-climbing accident. The students' insistence that "rumors and suspicions" of Gene's involvement must be clarified symbolizes the 1950s paranoia about national security. As Brinker, Gene's main accuser, says, "There is a war on [World War II]. Here's one soldier our side has already lost. We've got to find out what happened" (160). Yet Phinneas proves incapable of bitterness or blame; he not only refuses to participate in the proceedings but subsequently forgives Gene in a melodramatic deathbed scene. As Beidler writes, Phinneas's unwillingness to indict his friend, a decision born of his "absolute incapacity for hatred," appealed to the pacifism of the novel's baby-boom audience: "One could do it up-front, this book seemed to say, just say no to it without having to qualify for adulthood in the terrible old ways [like war]. It was not necessary ever to become like 'them' just to find out that remaining one's self was a clearly better choice. It was possible to be right on one's own in one's own time, in spiritual company with all others then or now like [Phinneas] who would [... let] 'them' down [...] by not becoming 'them'" (124).

The ethical-test plot appears also in Hunter's Jungle. When "problem" students at a Bronx trade school pommel their teacher, Richard Dadier, a young African American, Gregory Miller, breaks up the fight: "Miller had been presented with a choice. He could either step over the line with West [the chief instigator of trouble], or he could help in shoving West back over that line. He had chosen to help Rick. He had fought for him, and now the fight was over" (300). Miller's choice renews the frustrated teacher's hopes that these working-class kids are intuitively moral: "He remembered what he'd thought earlier, before the fight, remembered what he'd thought about just one kid, one kid, that's all, one kid getting something out of it all, one kid he could point to and say, 'I showed him the way,' and that would make it all right, if he could only say that" (301). The ethical-test plot is also prevalent in baby-boom nonfiction; see Grossberg 172-81; Palladino 206-23.

(n6.) For histories of adolescence and Hall's influence in constructing contemporary notions of it, see Bakan 989-92; Kett 217-21; Acland 27-29; Palladino xiii-xxii.

(n7.) Erikson defined adolescence as a "moratorium" between "the morality learned by the child, and the ethics to be developed by the adult," a period in which disaffection or "crises of integrity" were inevitable as youth discovered that its idealized childhood values would clash with real-world pragmatics (262-63). Goodman adapted Hall's argument by claiming that teen restlessness was a necessary corrective to the prosperity and affluence of the postwar boom: "The disaffection of the growing generation" for him bespoke a desire for "a more worth-while world" in which "to grow up," one in which "our inheritance, our immense productivity" was not "parceled out in a kind of domanial system" (xvi). The Erikson-edited anthology The Challenge of Youth (1965) gathers the era's quintessential redefinitions of adolescent disaffection, including essays by Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim, and Kenneth Keniston.

(n8.) Fiedler offers the most exacting critique of the American obsession with adolescence: "The great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children's section of the library. [...] In a compulsive way [the novelist] returns to a limited world of experience, usually associated with childhood, writing the same book over and over until he lapses into silence or self-parody" (24). For less condemnatory assessments, see Hassan; Carpenter; Johnson; Friedberg.

(n9.) Compare this scene with a similar one in Plath's The Bell Jar, in which Buddy Willard tries to seduce Esther by exposing himself. The sight of Buddy's genitalia reminds Esther of the distasteful animalism of sex: "The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed." More important, Buddy's awkward attempt to talk Esther into undressing for him makes her aware of her potential objectification in the eyes of men: "Undressing in front of Buddy suddenly appealed to me about as much as having my Posture Picture taken at college, where you have to stand naked in front of a camera, knowing all the time that a picture of you stark naked, both full view and side view, is going into the college gym files to be marked A B C or D depending on how straight you are" (55-56).

(n10.) See Young, who insists that chroniclers of modern youth "would not, could not, would never create a Jay Gatsby, a Holden Caulfield or a Dean Moriarty," for "the characters in [their] books, by very dint of their lack of individuality in a homogenized society, cannot be 'created,' cannot be born as personalities." Instead of fashioning themselves in the idealized image of romance and freedom that Fitzgerald, Salinger, and Kerouac celebrate, youth today discover themselves in an environment where it is "increasingly difficult to 'see' anything, let alone render it [...] through the blizzard of fall-out from an uncertain, nervously apocalyptic world" (19-20).

(n11.) Palladino correctly notes that such impassivity reflects a deflating belief in the possibilities of adolescent agency. Just as youth fiction in the 1950s and 1960s reflected the era's definition of youth as a "direct assault on adult prerogatives," a challenge to "traditional standards and values [that] weakened ties between age and authority," recent versions of the form have contributed to a new image of youth as "disengaged and [... exuding] an alarming air of futility and despair that is more threatening than teenage arrogance ever was" (Palladino 255). To ascribe that futility to what Moore calls a "postmodern crisis of affectivity" (256), however, overlooks the point I make here: these novels narrowly blame youth despair on familial neglect, not on the broader transformations of postmodernism.

(n12.) Salinger's allusion to Dickens was not just literary but commented also on the contemporary discourse of juvenile delinquency, which insisted that teen energies were insufficiently regulated by parental oversight. See Gilbert, whose comprehensive study explores how social scientists such as Eleanor and Sheldon Glueck "stress[ed] complex family relationships as explanations for delinquency," unlike such colleagues as Fredric Wertham, whose notorious Seduction of the Innocent (1954) insisted that insidious pop-culture influences (comic books, specifically) eroded the moral authority of parents. By contrast, the Gluecks' Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (1950) and Delinquents in the Making (1952) argued that delinquency was a "biosocial problem" created by "a variety of factors in the home, not from 'mass social stimulus.' Specifically, delinquents grew up in a 'family atmosphere not conducive to the development of emotionally well-integrated, happy youngsters, conditioned to obey legitimate authority'" (132-33).

(n13.) Wallace's bizarre short story "Girl with Curious Hair" offers a hilarious parody of this sort of sardonic detachment. Sick Puppy, the twenty-nine-year-old narrator, is both a wealthy "corporate liability troubleshooter" and a punk rocker who navigates effortlessly between those disparate worlds because he feels no particular attachment to either. He is at home amid Young Republicans and Sex Pistols enthusiasts alike because he experiences the world ase "a person [who] stares at objects as if they were too large to comprehend, often for a long time" (70). If Alison uses sarcasm to distance herself from emotional import, Sick Puppy registers the absurdities of sex, drugs, and violence with a discomforting tone of baroque obliviousness: "Gimlet whispered to my ear that in return for paying for the tickets [...] she would attempt to keep my erect penis in her mouth for several minutes [...] and that she would let me burn her with several matches on the backs of her legs, as well, and this made me very happy" (57). Although such passages might themselves seem exercises in chic alienation, Birkerts correctly argues that Wallace's "calculated pastiche of [...] phrasings drawn from TV, ad brochures, and commercial newspeak forces the larger question: if we are as we speak, then where is Sick Puppy? He has put his expression together from everywhere; he is frighteningly, awesomely nowhere" (391). In other words, Sick Puppy inhabits a world that Alison only wishes she could escape to-one completely devoid of emotional affect.

(n14.) Contrast these novels, for example, to Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, which depicts violence as vital to shaping the individual moral sensibility. Intriguingly, Burgess acknowledged how differently his antihero Alex and the violent nasdats (teens) of 1980s youth fiction define the purpose of depravity. In a mock interview with Burgess written to celebrate the novel's twenty-fifth anniversary, the now middle-aged malchick complains that kids today "are not like what I was. [...] They have not one vesch [thing] in their gullivers. [... They] are not seelny, strong that is." For Alex, ultraviolence is a sacred form of agency that prevents "chellovecks" from becoming clockwork oranges who lack the "human capacity for moral choice." For modern youth, however, that act of political resistance has degenerated into a banal fashion statement exemplified by "creeching golosses" (screeching music) and "filthy toofles" (sneakers). See "Alex on Today's Youth."

(n15.) Howe articulates the idealized response these narratives incite: "In the writing [of young authors], there is no confidence in any relationship between character, act, and outcome. The figures in their fictions are victims of hideous violence by accident; they commit crimes, but only for the hell of it; they hate, not understanding why they hate; they are loved or abused or depressed, and don't know why. [...] Randomness rules" (31).

(n16.) For a contrast, see Lipton, who insisted that youth decadence in the 1950s was a form of class warfare in which young "American rebels" fought for the "democratization of amorality" by stealing from the upper classes "the only things they [possess that is of] value for us: their leisure, their access to the arts-to music, literature, painting--the privilege of defying convention if they wanted to, of enjoying their vices and sinning with impunity" (283).

(n17.) Acland here is discussing Tim Hunter's 1987 film River's Edge, which offers a cinematic example of the stylized disaffection found in these novels.

(n18.) As early as 1925, a Bookman contributor complained that fictional parents were "convenient hooks upon which to blame for this or that characteristic of the hero's make-up," a point conveying the message of youth fiction: "How much that is cruel and wrong and stupid must the children suffer from us!" (Hansl 21, 24). Similar complaints can be heard throughout literary criticism of the 1950s and 1960s, most notoriously in Podhoretz's claim that the "know--nothing" beats symptomized the "poisonous glorification of the adolescent in American popular culture" by elevating "primitivism and spontaneity" over the mature, reasoned thought of adulthood (318).

(n19.) See also Lipsky and Abrams, who argue that "the constant factor in our experience as a generation has been a lack of constancy at home" (82).

(n20.) In Generations, Strauss and Howe quote Less Than Zero and Bicycle Days as evidence that post-baby boomers will become a "reactive generation" performing the "thankless job of yanking American history back on a stable course" by growing "more conservative in their private lives" and "making a great effort to shield their offspring from the less pleasant facts of life" (413-14). Similarly, Holtz attributes the "confusing, empty existences and gloomy futures" faced by teens "in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Douglas Coupland, Jill Eisenstadt, and others" to a parental failure to shelter youth from cynicism and pessimism (26). But the most striking example of this use of coming-of-age novels is Strauss and Howe's 13th Gen, which excerpts many of the passages analyzed here to attribute youth despair to adult permissiveness. Consider their interpretation of Leavitt's short story "Territory" (1982), which concerns a young man's struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with the traditional family structure. At one point, Neil Campbell remembers how his mother supplied him with "pamphlets detailing the dangers of bathhouses and back rooms, enemas and poppers, wordless sex in alleyways." Although Neil's "excursion into that world had been brief and lamentable, and was over," his mother continues to misperceive the homosexual world as promiscuous and anonymous (8). In 13th Gen, Mrs. Campbell's attempts to caution her son about the "dangers" of homosexuality symbolize the baleful liberties parents afford youth. The pamphlet passage is quoted in a chapter on how sex for the young means "making tough, day-to-day choices about all the new dangers, lifestyles, and freedoms passed on to them by older generations" (148; italics added). The implication is that Neil's homosexuality is exacerbated by his mother's strained effort to accept it. Her willingness to facilitate her son's sexual preference suggests why youth today find themselves "overwhelmed by a plague of sex-related catastrophes," including "the rise of a fearsome and deadly sexual disease (AIDS)." The invocation of AIDS alongside Leavitt's description of Neil's brief foray into bathhouses and "wordless sex" seems especially ill advised in implicitly associating homosexuality with the illicit and destructive.

(n21.) Studies by Theriot and Coontz are essential to understanding how "breakdowns" in the American nuclear family serve as rhetorical rallying cries for those who blame shifts in its composition on permissive attitudes rather than socioeconomic restructuring. See also Grossberg, who attributes youth's disaffection to an "apparent lack of willingness to support taxation for education and other child welfare needs [...] the increasing infringement of youths' constitutional rights [... and] the proliferation of practices attempting to both accelerate and control the socialization process" (188).

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By Kirk Curnutt, Troy State University, Montgomery

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Source: Critique, Fall2001, Vol. 43 Issue 1, p93, 19p
Item: 5317329