William Finnegan's Cold New World

...This reportorial method places in tension the individual and society, the unique and the representative, personal failing and structural breakdown, the impulse to observe and the impulse to explain, the writer "reluctant to sit in judgment" and the writer who occasionally can't help judging and even intervening...

...You leave this part of the book disturbed but unsurprised, and go down to San Augustine, Texas—a small town of the deep South where both blacks and whites live in a feudal relation to the sheriff...

...The outlines of Terry Jackson's life, and his mother's and girlfriends' and homeboys', basically conform to grim type...

...There has been a disastrous lag in policy response both to deindustrialization and to changes in the American family...

...Near the end of his book, William Finnegan introduces what in fiction would be called a minor character: Ronda Hardin—"a willowy, ice-blond sixteen-year-old" in an outer Los Angeles suburb who has connections with a neo-Nazi skinhead gang...

...This affords a psychic distance for both writer and reader that may be partly illusory but that also, I think, gives Finnegan enough room to produce his densest and most intense pages...

...The main difficulty is that East Texas doesn't corroborate Finnegan's central themes—it's an exception to them...

...Instead, Finnegan's moral imagination makes us see ourselves in relation to Terry: having come to know this young man deeply, his stubborn recklessness and his sweet dreams, we are suddenly forced to see him the way we see every threatening black youth on the street...

...It seems to have more to do with our culture...

...For forty years it has been the racially benign and probably crooked Nathan Tindall...

...Chicano nationalism and Mexico itself are unavailable fallbacks for this first-generation American, whose favorite movie is Natural Born Killers...

...By implication, it indicts those of us in the generation and class that have maximized freedom and opportunity— and then "wonder why the world at large has become harsher and more cynical, why our kids have become strange to us...

...So what's different —new about his world...

...The portraits were intimate but narrow, gripping as Finnegan's repeated visits turned up increasingly twisted relationships and fates, but lacking essential context— more like short stories than pieces of a novel...

...But what did I know about Juan, really...

...But the arrival of cocaine has created an exaggerated sense of siege, especially among whites...

...It takes in not one or two characters but the complex relations of a whole town, and a town that speaks of continuity more than change...

...With hardworking parents dedicated to the farmworkers' union, an attractive and ambitious girlfriend, and an ironic intelligence of his own, he seems poised to cash in on the immigrant's perennial dream...

...Instead, Juan's penchant for street fighting gets him thrown out of school and into jail...

...She is sweet, vacuous, frightened...

...The achievement here is in the "unofficial" moments that a more conventional reporter wouldn't have even seen, let alone known how to handle...

...DISSENT / Summer 1998 107...

...The introduction and epilogue and notes, along with new material (a minor character who puts a major one in re104 DISSENT / Summer 1998 lief, an explanatory passage, a sociological detour), make it clear that Finnegan isn't just a gifted watcher and listener...

...The nobility of labor was no longer even a minor value in the devouring consumerism of the America where he was growing up...

...Of his four settings, only San Augustine fails to bear this out...

...A lot of the time he isn't very sympathetic, and as for being human, every page shows him responding to the "barbaric, twilight world" in which he finds himself caught...

...There, southern black culture persists in its "fierce, hardearned realism...

...The Antelope Valley is one valley farther from L.A...

...He has a framework for these stories—an idea—which essentially goes like this: growing inequality and shrinking opportunity, combined with "the fecklessness and self-absorption of my generation" of parents (baby boomers, of all races and classes), has left the next adult Americans vulnerable to a nasty synesthesia of drugs, frantic consumerism, violently primitive ideologies, and pervasive despair...

...He does not look in her direction—his eyes are fixed on the mall ahead—but he is a young black male, strong and fast, in a parka and sneakers and a ski cap that says 'Loco,' and that's all the woman needs to see to feel a cold wave of fear...

...desert: when the New Yorker ran these four reports in its pages, especially the last three, readers got a distortingly condensed version of what Cold New World offers...

...Army paratrooper and white supremacist charged with randomly killing two blacks in North Carolina...

...Because "Navigating the teen world of the Antelope Valley felt, at times, like wading through the sucking bogs of my own generation's crash site...

...The result isn't confusion or contradiction but a kind of narrative polyphony, with nothing ever comfortable or settled...

...That's all, I realize, that most of us need to see...

...Each of these fraternities claims skinhead authenticity, but apart from their opposing racial ideologies, they seem more and more to resemble each other in their aimless afternoons spent lounging around parentless houses, their musical obsessions, their love of violence, and their contempt for the girls who hang on them...

...And he sees enough of himself in them, especially in Mindy's neo-Nazi boyfriend, Jaxon Stines, to register both a sense of responsibility and horror...

...I am convinced," he writes in his introduction, "that nearly all Americans already belong to basically the same culture," whose belief system is "liberal consumerismDISSENT/Summer 1998 105 a secular, individualist creed that essentially adds more shopping hours to the old exaltation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

...His life and his family's well-being are threatened by rival gang members out for revenge...

...The feds' Operation White Tornado turns tiny San Augustine into a battleground of the drug war, with numerous casualties, including some of the town's more promising black entrepreneurs, as well as Nathan Tindall himself...

...Its young people seemed the most seriously lost, its public spaces the most forbidding...

...The pop culture that formed so much of [Juan's] world view simply provided no referents for their kind of heroism...

...The cocaine raids may have replaced the old patron sheriff with a new and harsher law-enforcement model, but they have also reaffirmed race and class divisions as old as slavery...

...Mindy Turner, who started using speed in ninth grade, has gone from one side to the other and incurred the wrath of both gangs while clinging to her neo-Nazi boyfriend...

...To Juan, much of American reality seems "weird," and yet there is no other place for him...

...It contained, I realized, more shame...

...Juan Guerrero, young Chicano antihero from the Yakima Valley near Seattle, is something of an enigma...

...it still focuses people's lives and relationships...

...Her hometown is a real place, not a residential accident...

...Deindustrialization hasn't changed the economics of race and pulpwood hauling...

...THE PICTURE grows darker and less stable in the book's last two sections...

...This idea takes in both economic and moral causes and, without letting the kids entirely off the hook (Finnegan's stance is simultaneously ironic, worried, exasperated, and seduced), accepts Christopher Lasch's point that "their dislocation is a measure of our failure, not theirs...

...A kind of paralyzing anomie overcomes Juan...

...He's headed downward...

...Finnegan (who is a friend of mine) doesn't stop with this observed nuance...

...It makes even the most bizarre and self-destructive behavior at least partly comprehensible as an inchoate response to real pressures...

...In New Haven, the villain is structural unemployment, the ruins of deindustrialization seen in cities all across the North and felt most sharply by blacks...

...The passage—there are dozens like it—is typical of Finnegan's approach to his subject, which is the downward mobility of four American communities in the nineties and its effect on a few young people...

...Yet even here, the judgment is implicit: this is the way things are in the world we've inherited and made our own...

...But Cold New World is not a comforting book...

...Why...

...than the scene of Finnegan's own happy middle-class adolescence, in the 1960s...

...He listens, alert to speech and all its shadings, capturing the minutest motions of character so that even Ronda Hardin, for a paragraph, comes alive on the page in her individual idiosyncrasies and tribal markings...

...When Finnegan isolates Terry Jackson's chaotic, drug-addicted mother, Anjelica, as "an image of my generation's performance as parents," counterimage comes to mind of a pair of professional white forty-somethings urging their two-year-old Hannah to articulate her needs...

...By the end, the finger is pointing back at the author himself, who stands for you and me...

...I had found the valley more disturbing, in many ways, than the other communities featured in this book...

...The downward mobility of Finnegan's main character here, a vibrant twenty-threeyearold black woman named Lanee Mitchell, into single-motherhood and a poultry job seems relatively slight compared to that of her younger analogues in the other sections...

...The Antelope Valley, one of L.A.'s fastest-growing bedroom communities, became during the early-nineties recession the scene of financial disaster, widespread crystal-methamphetamine use, and an ugly, low-intensity war among various gangs, especially the racist Nazi Low Riders and the Sharps, or Skinheads 106 DISSENT / Summer 1998 Against Racial Prejudice...

...The answer might be less tangible than economic contraction and generational abandonment...

...I, for what it's worth, blame the government...

...Gangs have become a major problem, but we don't have enough evidence to pronounce the school system hopeless...

...Because she lacked that reassurance, her beloved hatred seemed to be a main prop of her self-respect...

...Juan's younger brother seems to be doing well...

...A young black drug dealer in New Haven, residents of a small East Texas town caught in the federal drug war, the violently alienated son of Mexican union farmworkers near Seattle, white racist and antiracist skinheads in the bedroom sprawl of the L.A...

...Cold New World is more than the sum of its New Yorker parts...

...The parents are at home, they worry over Juan, have given him a model of hard work and political idealism (which leaves him cold...

...her hero is Charles Manson, and at the end of the book she becomes the pen pal of James Burmeister, the U.S...

...One crucial aspect of the new generation's worldview is the lack of a political ideology more viable and appealing than, for example, James Burmeister's...

...In the end they may destroy their child, too, but in a wholly different way...

...So perhaps the main difference between Juan and his teenage ancestors of earlier generations is the mental atmosphere of the country in which he's been raised—the difference, say, between Rebel Without a Cause and Natural Born Killers...

...The book starts with a fifteenyear-old black youth who gets drawn almost inexorably into the New Haven crack trade—in other words, a figure we think we know...

...These words might give comfort to readers of this magazine, who presumably agree on the need for such a policy response...

...School holds no interest for him...

...This section feels a bit diffuse and long, the book's only lull...

...THIS INDICTMENT creeps up on the reader, as it seems to have crept up on Finnegan...

...In Juan's case, though, the economic and generational explanations aren't completely persuasive...

...Finnegan's own politics are social democratic (and thus completely opaque to his subjects...

...The generational argument, of course, is harder to make than the economic one...

...Commercialism is far stronger than Rafael and Rosa Guerrero...

...What we get isn't the cheap journalistic insight that Terry is a sympathetic human being, too...

...He still seemed hopeful that he might have other chances in life, a trajectory that might be all his own," Finnegan writes...

...Among the wastes of tract housing, Finnegan comes upon the generation that his own raised—the next William Finnegans...

...Finnegan, who has written three books about southern Africa, feels in the Antelope Valley a nausea worse than anything that overcame him in war-torn Mozambique...

...GEORGE PACKER'S novel Central Square will be published in October by Graywolf...

...For alienation and dislocation, nothing in the book equals its last part...

...It was the wealthiest of them, certainly, but it was also the least coherent...

...The ancient poverty and injustice of San Augustine almost seem benign next to the hollowed-out American landscapes Finnegan elsewhere brings to the page...

...His relentless attention to the textured lives of these teenagers also has a gradually demoralizing effect, for the cumulative vision is of lost souls wandering around in a wasted landscape at once drearily familiar and chillingly new...

...Having dropped Terry in downtown New Haven, Finnegan watches from his slowly moving car: "He is in a good mood, and he cuts through the crowd on the sidewalk with a vivid, rising step...

...Ronda talked "in a breathy, high, almost reverential voice, about 'my hatred' . . . as if the thought of this burning racial animus itself evoked a kind of tender awe...

...What one can say is that while Hannah's every burp is being monitored, the fate of other, less privileged children (many of them white) is left increasingly to the mercies of the market and the skills of their beleaguered, distracted, or simply incompetent parents...

...As for work, there are opportunities in Seattle that Juan's girlfriend appears ready to seize, until she gravitates back to her jailed lover...

...Every kid Finnegan meets is in trouble...

...Even Terry Jackson, in New Haven . . . seemed more at home in his world...

...In his cool rebellion Juan is slightly reminiscent of that long-ago type, the hipster...

...In one of the many indelible quotes that fill this book, Juan shrugs and tells Finnegan, "It's all cool, in a way, I would say...

...He goes on to situate the hatred, the girl, the tone of voice: "The frame around everything she said was . . . a sense of loss—loss of a marginal color-caste privilege that, in her mind, was supposed to keep black people beneath her socially, and in that way somehow prevent the worst from happening to her...

...In shorthand, a generation that worshiped personal freedom has produced a generation whose sense of drastically reduced possibility has led Jaxon Stines to worship violent restrictions on freedom...

...Then, in the next paragraph or the next chapter, he moves outward to take in the world that made Ronda Hardin, going by the maxim that "What young people show us is simply the world we have made for them...

...MTV-raised farmworkers' kids like Juan ended up gazing out into a society that, beyond the most immediate circle of family and friends, looked deeply atomized and alien...

...He went back, he writes, "looking for the kind of place where I grew up," but more likely he was looking for the kind of frightening mutation that he found...

...By the time a black Sharp named Darius stabs to death a Nazi Low Rider at a party, Finnegan seems to have lost his powers of sympathetic interpretation...

...The example Juan might have absorbed from his parents is bound to dissolve when immersed in the wider American scene...

...I notice other pedestrians shying from him, and suddenly I see him through the eyes of an elderly white woman with a shopping bag who grimaces and braces herself as Terry sweeps past her...

...Their liberalminded, hard-pressed, or just strung-out parents are bewildered...

...Her political ideal is "free unity...

...Southern California was the birthplace of the tax revolt, and the Antelope Valley gives Finnegan plenty of scope to comment on the effect of this public abandonment on schools, communities, and teenagers...

...Cold New World is starkly dramatized, carefully researched, passionately argued, and so thick with detail that, when Finnegan allows himself a conclusion—even one that's immediately qualified or questioned—it carries unusual authority...

...One feels him pulling away from the rigors of observation and identification...