Hanging on the Edge

By LANCE MORROW

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.

The American middle class is accustomed to protracted adolescence almost as an entitlement. Disorienting, then, to confront the sometimes fatal precocity of the young in Finnegan's marginal world. H.L. Mencken had the American masses down as the "booboisie," hopelessly straight and dull and dumb. Finnegan catches perfectly the way ordinary America today may pass through some moral looking glass into a devouring universal consumers' bazaar wherein the remotest locales sell the fanciest drugs and perversions, and the minds of the young, ungrounded by their absent parents' experience or protection, become unrecognizably weird. Mindy, a model-pretty 17-year-old and former Nazi Low Rider gone over to the Sharps, nonetheless reports that her heroes--besides Alicia Silverstone--are Hitler and Charles Manson: "I think [Manson]'s cute."

In Antelope Valley's skinhead fringe Finnegan sees a new kind of despairing descent of the white middle class intersecting on the way down with upwardly mobile blacks moving into the valley. In the black community of New Haven, bitterly set cheek-by-jowl with the neverland of Yale, Finnegan allows himself a generalization about "structural unemployment--the cruelest edge of the American economy's deindustrialization and increasing reliance on untrained, insecure labor, and a close cousin to the pervasive undereducation in public schools in poor and working-class neighborhoods."

Absolutely right. But Finnegan's book, a status report on the American Dream, gets its power the way a good novel does: from sheer story--the unpredictable, rich specifics of people's lives. Alas, every syllable of the book rings true.