American Youth: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In telling the story of New England ninth grader Ted LeClare, LaMarche takes Mitch Albom–like sincerity, holds it arm's length from George Saunders–like deadpan satire, and transports the lot to a gun-crazy America that he refuses to judge. The results make his characters unwittingly sophisticated vessels for the hopes and fears of the post-post-Columbine exurbs. The plot is simple: while showing off his .22, Ted loads the gun; while Ted's back is turned, his schoolmate Kevin Dennison accidentally kills Kevin's younger brother, Bobby. The aftermath includes Ted's being taken up by a group of boys calling themselves the American Youth, teens who spout a debased, quasireligious, gun rights, antidevelopment, NIMBY-like parody of conservative talk show rhetoric. Ted also, at his mother's direction (his father is absent), lies about having loaded the gun. As Ted (referred to as "the boy" most of the time) comes around to telling the truth about what happened, there are detours into bad behavior with the Youth. In vivid set pieces, aimless teens take vigilante action against creeping cookie-cutter housing and enforce a bizarre set of double-standards. Drugs, alcohol and sex fascinate and repel the Youth in equal measure. LaMarche deftly allows his debut to be at once a parable and a dead-on rendering of its time and place. (Apr.)
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Ted LeClare, a New England ninth grader, is showing off his father's guns when he hands one to visiting brothers. While he is in another room, one accidentally shoots and kills the other. Ted's terrified mother tells him not to tell the authorities that he loaded the gun. When Ted, who is referred to as the boy throughout the novel, returns to school after this violent incident, he is rejected by most classmates but is befriended by a group who call themselves American Youth. Their interests lie in vandalizing houses in the new subdivisions that are taking over the countryside. The Youth embrace gun rights, vigilante acts, and their own brand of religion that helps them rationalize their activities. As Ted begins to see the Youth for what they really are, he finally tells the truth about loading the gun and begins to feel release from his own guilt and pain. This novel is a harrowing but unsentimental look at Ted's world–an impersonal place of encroaching subdivisions and pressures to fit in, and where young people are caught between absurd double standards. The account is honest and perceptive, and readers will find themselves hoping that Ted will rise up through his anger and sadness as he wrestles with his personal dilemma of whether or not to tell the truth at great cost to himself and his family.–Susanne Bardelson, Kitsap Regional Library, WA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (April 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400066050
• ISBN-13: 978-1400066056
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #846,743 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful exploration of what it means to be a teenager in America, April 20, 2007

By	Richard G. Denoncourt "rdenoncourt" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars solid debut, June 19, 2007

By	Yalensian - See all my reviews

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great first novel. , June 28, 2007

By	J. Bosiljevac (san fran, ca) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.