Growing Up in America

...what he doesn't know until much later is that his father has been fooling around...

...He has, as they discover slowly and painfully, been hospitalized for anorexia nervosa...

...It would take a lot of work, probably years and years of study, but that was all right because in the end, Billy would know something hardly anyone else knew, except for several hundred million Chinese people...

...even if it proves to be nothing more than a faulty myth of human adaptation it is, all the same, a myth we cannot as yet afford to do without, for the simple reason that most of us are born and raised within its beleaguered confines...

...Besides taking these thorough notes, he was resolved to read all the books, to do all the suggested outside reading, to speak up in class and to find interested friends with whom he might continue the discussions begun in class...

...he liked the idea of himself as adoctor, making important diagnoses, giving shots, prescribing prescriptions, getting to act curt and overworked...

...No matter what Welles and 1 thought the story was it wasn't supposed to happen at all, they can almost always save those people, except that this mystery pneumonia knocked him over and dragged him off before they could even identify the bug...

...her mother bakes cookies and people talk to each ot her at the dinner table...

...Billy goes off to the only school that has accepted him?Beacham University in Connecticut—with grand hopes of compensatory overachievement: "He had never taken good notes in high school but he was determined to start doing so for college...

...But suddenly, at the moment of crisis, the vulnerability inherent in such an atmosphere is perceived differently by the young narrator—with comprehension instead of reproach...

...Unfortunately, Wild Oats is overblown, going on at far too great a length about experiences that don't merit such elaboration...

...The interesting questions to be asked, then, are small rather than large: What happens, amid the cultural dismemberment, to childhood...

...Mom, however, has known all along and decides to leave home, tiredof keeping up the pretense...

...Kit Reed's latest novel, The Ballad of T. Rantula (Little, Brown, 234 pp., $8.95), attempts to answer these questions in an original and entertaining manner...

...The oats that get sown in Wild Oats are, in fact, rather tame, and Billy Williams is hardly your traditional merrymaking rascal: Hindered by self-consciousness and a developed sense of the absurd, he looks askance at the rowdier doings of his cronies and spends most of his time minutely analyzing his own sensations...

...He thinks 1 can't do anything," he explains to Futch...

...Pop tries hard to communicate and takes his son fishing on Sunday morning in place of taking him to church...

...Tig's family is moneyed and cold...

...See, I knew you couldn't do anything...

...Billy tries to save Zizi from the unreliable charms of Mr...

...Billy Williams resides on New York City's Upper East Side with his younger sister, Abigail, and his mother?a brittle woman" given to frenzied bursts of anger at her live-in beau, Henry...

...Perhaps Epstein, who is barely out of Yale himself, needs to acquire greater distance from the sturm und drung of his own adolescence...

...At the end of the novel Futch's parents are tentatively reconciled and the family attends Tig's funeral together...

...Finally, w hen Futch and Welles begin high school in the fall, Tig is not there altogether...

...The mother, who feels she has wasted her life, can be found most afternoons leaning against the window and crying...

...Her story is narrated by a 13-year-old known as "Futch" to his peers and Freddy to his parents...

...It didn't happen the way I had expected," Futch reports in the oh-so-casual tone he adopts toward distressing events...

...These are the last days, thelastdays, the last," he croons inside Futch's head, or "It'sgotta be the end because it's worse than the past...

...She said: When I die, it will be around this time in the afternoon...

...he writes of youthful introspection and perturbation with insight and wit...

...Tig, whose father makes homosexual advances to his students and has permanently retreated from involvement with his son, takes up running to "show" his father...

...While Kit Reed's novel is a good one, it is not as strong as it might have been had she eschewed facile juxtapositions...

...and I knew why we were all reaching, straining...

...The Pterodactyl...

...The Ballad of T. Rantula gives us an unusual perspective upon a subject generally explored from the angle of "liberated" husbands and wives...

...Futch's best friends are Welles (Eleanor) and Tig (Ralph...

...Mom hugs Futch a lot and can make a nice meat loaf when she sets her mind to it...

...A JL JLmerka hastens the childhood years and then?almost as if to make up for this—delays adolescence as long as possible...

...all right, we were trying to hold onto it: what we've already got...

...As portrayed here, all children are seekers after emotional honesty and all adults are dissemblers...

...Welles' family is the old-fashioned kind...

...the negative portrayals began some years ago with a cinema-verite exposure of the Louds and have continued into the present with ever new spinoffs on the hapless nature of family life—whether it be black, white, single-parent, or parentless...

...in short, everything that goes along with being old enough to vote and drink yet too young to know what you really want to be when (and if) you grow up...

...Considered separately, Futch's family is not bad...

...his handsome father, a professor, gives his pretty mother matching amethysts for Christmas and their basement is filled with the latest in scientific games for Tig to play with...

...Jacob Epstein has an almost Drei-serian eye for social detail and a real comic flair...

...Yet as a cohesive unit—which is, after all, what families are supposed to be—the Crandalls are hopeless...

...The adults, as is their wont, blunt reality with euphemistic descriptions, hip fairytales of loss and mourning: "Everybody had decided you didn't wear black to a kid's funeral, they weren't even calling it a funeral, it was supposed to be a memorial service, and to look at them you would have thought we were at the president's bash that he gives to kick off the school year...

...Futch is mystified by her depression...

...His family lives in a with-it academic community in Boston, where the adults regress and the children mature very quickly...

...Russo, their English professor...

...9.95) is about college—that haven of deferred responsibilities—and unrequited love and identity-crisis...

...Tig's friends see less and less of him because he spends all his free time running or getting himself in shape so he can run faster and longer...

...The shared fantasy of revenge upon the grown-up world, though, isn't enough to stave off the individual effects of deprivation...

...As the term wears on Billy's ambitions fade, however, and all he can concentrate on is Zizi, a girl he was smitten with three years before at a summer resort who now reappears in his literature class...

...Still, its schematic arbitrariness aside, Reed has written a novel whose narrative voice—a child's, and hence a very tricky one—rarely strains, maintaining a remarkable balance between the ingenuous and the worldly-wise...

...surely there are children who, on occasion, lie about their feelings and adults who, on occasion, tell the truth...

...Even when we would go out together," she explains to Futch when he comes to visit her in her new family—a communal household run by her former marriage counselor, Al?the three of us, we weren't a family, we were somebody's idea of a family, magazine pictures, all I was was the middle-sized one that smiled at him when he wanted me to and held your hand so you wouldn't run into the street...

...He checks out economics as well because he has been told "that's the big field these days," and he tries a biology course, just to be sure: "He didn't want to close off any doors...

...What happens to the process of becoming a grownup...

...The parents' modus operandi, denial and avoidance, has been the source of Futch and his friends' raging fantasies—first of T. Rantula and then, more fatally, of Tig's self-destructive vision of physical omnipotence...

...Jacob Epstein's H'ild Oatsi Little, Brown, 267 pp...

...He plans to run off with her to a life of sunshine and labor on an organic farm in California, until he discovers—unconscionably slowly—that she is not in the least serious about him or his concoctions for their joint future...

...These goals before him, he attends a language class: "Billy figured that studying Chinese was a pretty shrewd idea...

...And granted that children often crave the very routines and traditions their parents have dispensed with, I am not convinced they desire them as consciously as Futch and his friends do: "Naturally it was Welles' mother that had called, Welles is always bitching because they are so strict but she does it with this, well, snug look: that it's not such a bad thing because she can count on it...

...Reed's young speaker provides an unsettling glimpse of what their liberation looks like to the sons and daughters...

...But the family won't go away...

...He'd say...

...A few weeks after informing his stunned pals that he has stopped eating because "I don't really have to," he dies...

...Futch, Tig and Welles shield themselves from the encroaching chaos and the anger it evokes in them by writing the continuous ballad of T. Rantula, an imaginary rock star of great power whose specialty is millenial forecasting...

...Billy's father has remarried and moved to California, from where he sends incomprehensible short-stories, with titles like "HARK...

...Once he is better able to separate the fictional wheat from the chaff, his talents will doubtless be featured to riper effect...

...Television, always sensitive to photogenic disintegration, has been perhaps least kind...