American Youth
Jerry Stahl has high praises for Phil Lamarche's "American Youth". In a review of the book in Los Angeles Times, calling the book "the most savagely beautiful, emotionally devastating and accurate readings of what it means to grow up in our soul-starved homeland that I've ever read" he writes further
By Page 17 — hating myself — I realized I was rereading passages the way you'd hold up diamonds and examine them in the light. Sentence by sentence, the author has created a heart-squeezing chain of violence and consequence that makes us care about the characters, who suffer and live in the pitiless rural landscape of a Johnny Cash song. The language sounds pared down, over the years, by someone who took the time to make it perfect.
(...)
Along with boys-in-boots classics like the straight-edge novel "American Skin" or the movie "American History X" starring Edward Norton, "American Youth" traffics in the inchoate angst and damage that morphs young men into pubescent fascists. But Phil LaMarche does not simply show us this jagged world, he makes us feel what it's like to live there. This, in the end, is what makes "American Youth" nothing less than a masterpiece.
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