Volume 45, Number 12 · July 16, 1998
A Lost Generation
By Joyce Carol Oates
Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country
by William Finnegan
Random House, 421 pp., $26.00
'I was lost in the sand,' says Terry Jackson, a sixteen-year-old black New Haven drug dealer, recounting to William Finnegan the most recent violent episode in his life as a member of a drug-dealing 'posse' in constant danger of attack by rival posses. 'I'm still lost in the sand. You can look in my face and tell.' Except for his streetwise eloquence, Terry Jackson might be speaking for any number of his adolescent contemporaries in America and certainly for the dazed, drifting, disenfranchised young people of whom William Finnegan has written with compassion and patience, if sometimes rather too much patience, after six years of 'knocking about' the country investigating the 'postmodern poverty of the late twentieth century' with its proliferation of underclasses, black, Hispanic, and white.
Review, 2969 words
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