Books: Hanging on the Edge

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Huckleberry Finn, if grimly read, might be a caseworker's report on family dysfunction, child abuse, alcoholism, clan violence, stupidity, hypocrisy and institutionalized racial oppression--a sweet classic, maybe, but also a fairly accurate picture of life along the Mississippi in the mid-19th century.

When one reads the title of William Finnegan's Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country (Random House; 421 pages; $26), a journalist's sampler of youth on the margins in the 1990s, one wants to ask, "Harder compared to what?" To life in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression? Or to growing up almost anywhere in the developing world today? In 1998, in an America presided over by the quintessential Mark Twain character Bill Clinton (an irrepressible trickster out of Arkansas with late-adolescent hormones), the Dow noses up toward 10,000, and this spring's college graduates emerge into the best job market in years. If this is "harder," then send my generals a case of it.

But Finnegan understands America, beneath the surface, as many countries and states of mind, some of them deeply disturbing and rotten in unprecedented ways. A staff writer for the New Yorker, Finnegan spent about six years hanging out among the young on the dark edges of postindustrial America. His technique is narrative journalism (formerly New Journalism, or later, Literary Journalism)--reportage as documentary storytelling. In Finnegan, the dazzling special effects of such founding fathers as Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer have given way to an admirable transparency. The author-observer, like a good scientist in nature, all but vanishes. Finnegan fleetingly appears from time to time, only as a kind of bemused white-bread oddity wearing burgundy Rockport shoes, set down for a while among black dope dealers in New Haven, Conn.; or Chicano gangbangers in the Yakima Valley of Washington State; or piney-woods country people in East Texas; or, finally, among forlornly vicious white junior Nazis, feral and bored to death, in Antelope Valley, in northern Los Angeles County.

Finnegan--rarely judging or mongering a thesis--strings the adolescents' stories along the common threads he found, the underthemes and structural weaknesses of America now: the destruction of families and absence of parents, the astonishingly pervasive presence of drugs and gun violence, a sort of postmodern lostness and indiscipline. The self-absorbed fecklessness of the adults--the abdicated parents in most of these dramas, often useless druggies and alcoholics themselves--makes the reader despise them in a way he never quite hated Pap Finn.

The teenage neo-Nazis of Antelope Valley--skinheads jacked up on crystal methamphetamines and flipping each other Sieg heil salutes, drew this diagnosis from the director of a local gang-prevention center: "Virtually all were abused, sexually and otherwise, as kids, and they hate the world." A young Nazi makes an unpersuasive victim, but still...one member of the Sharps--an interesting hybrid, skinheads devoted to racial tolerance--had a meth-addict mother and a pothead father, an alcoholic stepfather and a favorite aunt who died of a heroin overdose.