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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #631576 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Guardian
'Superbly edgy'

Review
‘LaMarche is a young master -- of compression, of the essential American problems, of the heartfelt realist narrative. What an amazing, gratifying book -- we are lucky to have it. AMERICAN YOUTH proves that the novel is still our most vital way of communicating essential information, and LaMarche proves that there are still young geniuses among us, wringing new life from the old form.' (George Saunders )

‘Men have never written about becoming a man as Phil LaMarche does in this page-turning debut. He's the new Cormac McCarthy-in-waiting, wielding firearms with a muscular prose also evocative of Hemingway. The story runs hot as a pistol bore all the way through, with characters you can't bear to leave. At a time when so much fiction is chilly, ironic babbly, cobbled around ideology or written to wow a reader with the writer's pyrotechnic mastery of data, LaMarche's book is a heartfelt offering to the world.’

(Mary Karr, author of THE LIAR'S CLUB )

'AMERICAN YOUTH is written with great psychological precision and insight. It is a portrait of a society in crisis and decay, but, more important, it is a gripping dramatisation of the relationship between a vulnerable and interesting protagonist and the hard world around him. He is someone on whom nothing is lost; in language both spare and truthful his plight is rendered fascinating and deeply convincing and memorable'

(Colm Toibin )

'AMERICAN YOUTH is a novel that demonstrates par excellence that the best writing is sometimes the simplest. A story of the individual, a story of America, it is one of those (all too) rare books that has stayed with me long after reading the last page.' (Kate Atkinson )

George Saunders
'An amazing, gratifying book...LaMarche proves that there are
still young geniuses among us, wringing new life from the old form'

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Customer Reviews

"Some ways are just no way"
In Phil Lamarche's stark and unforgiving American Youth, the young Teddy LeClare lives with his mother on the edges of an estate that in recent years has been slowly transforming as the influx of new money slowly pushes the out working class. Donna is a teacher at the local high school and supports the family, while Teddy's father, Pete, an insurance salesman, has been forced to find work in far off Pennsylvania.

Recently a recession has hit the small town in which they live and while Pete hopes that the sale of their house will give them the much-needed financial break they've been looking for, Donna anxiously hopes for a change in the economy. Meanwhile, Teddy when he's not angrily disposing of the for sale sign in front of their house, is set restlessly adrift.

Lonely and vulnerable, Teddy is also prone to boredom and experimentation. Unable to connect with his far-off father, he battles the demons of his adolescence by spending his days trolling the forests of Woodbury Heights with his best friend Terry, helping him make Molotov cocktails. But it is through his friendship with Bobby Dennison and his brother Kevin that Teddy's that life takes on a new meaning for him, eventually threatening to engulf the boy, and that of his parents.

One afternoon, while showing Bobby and Kevin how to load a gun, Teddy momentarily becomes distracted by his mother as she sweeps outside. Suddenly there's a loud clap like the sound of thunder that reverberates throughout the house. Teddy returns to the living room to discover Bobby on his back with bullet in his chest. "He wanted it and I wasn't done. He pulled it," Kevin violently screams as he shoves the gun at Teddy and runs from the room.

Teddy tells his mother that it was he who showed them the gun and then stuffed it back under the cabinet, but it was actually Kevin who loaded the gun and pulled the trigger. But when Duncan, the family friend and local police officer begins the investigation, he finds that Kevin is saying the exact opposite. Panic stricken, Donna swears her son to silence, certain that even if it was an accident there's a serious possibly that charges of negligence maybe filed against them by Bobby's family.

In a town where fires are constantly stoking the rumor mill, Pete returns from Pennsylvania, ordering Ted not to say a word, "if someone asks you just shrug it off, pretend you don't know what they're talking about." Teddy sticks to his father's policy of not speaking about the shooting or indeed of what is to come, even though his mind constantly grounds through the events surrounding that terrible day.

At school Teddy keeps his head down and goes about his business, his days a mixture of paranoia and fear. Soon, however, he breaks his self-enforced silence when he connects with Peckerhead Jackson and George Haney, two boys who together with their idiosyncratic dress code of black suspenders, white T-shirts, and pressed khakis, inform him they're part of an elite club, a sort of underground vigilante force.

"We're all red-blooded Americans here and we like guns too," they tell Teddy. Called American Youth, they spend their free time rattling out drug dealers, participating in pep rallies and organizing protests against anything that defy what they see to be good, wholesome and true. In their world even vandalism is a form of protest. Trapped in his cycle of despair, Teddy is drawn into their circle, intent to hang out and even cause a bit of trouble.

But when he falls into the arms of the dissolute Colleen, a girlfriend of one of the boys, the gang becomes furious at him, their respect for his knowledge of guns turning inward and twisting into rage as they become intent to take out cruel revenge someone whom they think has violated of their most basic principles.

In blunt and beautifully bleak prose, Lamarche is able to present Teddy's life exactly as it is, as the boy urgently tries to blunt the pain of Bobby's accident while also coping with the seductive fascination of American Youth. In the spell of days and nights that follow, Teddy takes to burning himself with cigarette lighter. He can't say why he burns himself or why it feels so could, he just knows that when he does it, he becomes "the burning and the pain, and "when he is the pain, he doesn't have to be anything else."

Lamarche paints an austere vision of a society where the gun culture is not just endemic, but also holds an alarming generational influence. It is after all, Teddy's Uncle John who proudly displays his home collection firearms for all to see, including the impressionable Teddy.

Of course fate eventually intercedes, and as the narrative builds towards its shocking climax, Teddy realizes that the doctrine of American Youth is a sham, their efforts to preserve a status quo nothing but a pretense and a fraud. On the downside though, it is Teddy's innate and almost instinctive love of guns that is anything but broken. Mike Leonard June 07.