Word: finnegans
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...manager of the Elephant Walk restaurant, which is moving from its current location in Somerville to the space formerly occupied by Finnegan's Wake pub in Porter Square and the manager of 7-Eleven, which is replacing Christy's Market at 36-40 John F. Kennedy...