Teens and immortals: two books

As I like Thomas Hine’s Populuxe and The Great Funk, I anticipated a good read in his THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience. I didn’t get it.

Several writers have discussed “teenager” as a concept that took form in the 20th century. Hine agrees, arguing that before high school became near-universal, there was no common teenage experience: social class, strength and size (a strapping 12-year-old might be working on the docks like an adult while a scrawny 15 year old was still considered a kid), parent’s business (farm? General store? Accounting?), city or country, black or white made adolescence too diverse. Hine says that having a common youth culture also springs out of the high school experience but has been splintering since the baby boom into multiple subcultures such as Goth, stoner, jock, theater nerd, etc.

This one didn’t work for me. The writing isn’t as lively as his earlier books, gets cliched as it approaches the century’s end (his analysis isn’t that different from the average teen movie) and it suffers from omissions — nothing on feminism, nothing on gay kids being increasingly out. Not a winner.

Neither was Jack Vance’s TO LIVE FOREVER, set in a distant future where thed 1 percent receive cloning-based immortality while assassinations of the lower classes makes up for the drain on Earth’s resources the immortals cause (this idea isn’t explored enough). Protagonist Waylock achieved Amaranth (the immortal social class), then got sentenced to death when he murdered another Amaranth, though as he points out it didn’t cost them anything but inconvenience. Now he’s posing as his own renegade clone in hopes of regaining Amaranth status but the rules for doing so are byzantine — and the beautiful immortal Jacynth seems to have figured out his true identity.

Stories of a protagonist smashing through a hostile society to achieve success have a long history in SF but this one doesn’t work. Part of that is that the ending feels forced and the Jacynth simply drops out of the story. Not Vance’s best.

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