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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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- - - - Copyright 2002 Chicago Sun Times
- - - - THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING 2002 Dave Eggers, editor; Michael Cart, series editor Houghton Mifflin. $27.50. A father recently said he had lost count of his 20something's tattoos, or any of his many body modifications for that matter. The dad had forgotten his son's natural hair color. His friends worship Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers (but not for their latest foray into bluegrass). Hollywood violence, drugs and sex do not shock them. They owned DVD players long before their parents could set the VCR clocks, and their agility on the Internet is both impressive and frightening. When it comes to required reading, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk and Dave Eggers are at the top of their lists. Now this "generation," or at least the age group of 15 to 25 targeted by editors Eggers and Michael Cart in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002, has its own anthology to look forward to each October. Of the several yearly anthologies Houghton Mifflin publishes, this latest collection is the hardest to define. Perhaps it's the premise that 15 year-olds have anything in common with 25 year-olds. Cart, author of Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth, writes that the age group that once applied to the term "young adults" has shifted upwards from its former span of 12 to 18. The old definition "can't do justice to the complexity of a new literature that has intrinsic appeal to a cross-generational readership as young as 15 and as (relatively) old as 25." That literary complexity, Cart writes, came about in the mid- 1990s when writers began tackling such taboo subjects as incest, abuse and even unhappy endings. Finally, "writers were at last permitted to match the sophistication of their readers with the sophistication of their material and their creative ambition." Perhaps the motivation for this volume has more to do with a couple of statistics cited in the foreword: there are currently 34 million Americans under 20, and the average teen spent $104 a week in 2001. Eggers is less exacting in describing the collection. The author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the self-published You Shall Know Our Velocity writes, "It's not scientific. It's a strange and potent mix of stuff, always frank, never shrinking, all over the world and back." Eggers' hype is not too far off. The 22 "nonrequired" pieces are both fact and fiction. Most of it falls into works of straight journalism, reportage, humor, short stories and personal essays. There is even a hybrid of sorts, "My Fake Job," a satire of the dot.com boom by Rodney Rothman. The piece was first published as nonfiction in the New Yorker, which then disowned it when it turned out that some details presented as true-life were invented. Eggers instructs readers to now view the piece as fiction. Maybe we should call it "faction." Either way, the essay-short story is superb. The publications from which the pieces are gleaned are also varied. They include mainstream titles such as Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, Village Voice and Time. Then there are less generally known publications including Epoch, ZYZZYVA, Transition, To-Do List and Little Engine. Somewhere in the middle are the Modern Humorist, Jane, the Onion and McSweeney's, Eggers' own online and in- print journal. Two of the strongest selections, however, were self-published. The stream-of-conscious journal of a teenager who calls herself Zoe Trope (not to be confused with Francis Ford Coppola's fiction journal by the same name that also has a selection in this anthology) was published in her chapbook Please Don't Kill the Freshman. Trope's piece is a gem that crystallizes perfectly that dreadful first year of high school when cliques are formed and hormones are raging: "Seven weeks left of this building. I am frightened. Very frightened. Sometimes the entire world scares the crap out of me. I still feel vague and cryptic. Season finales for all my favorite TV shows. The never-ending purr of lawn mowers in my neighborhood. Sky continually a beautiful shade of light blue. More reasons for fear. Some of my friends are driving, smoking pot, piercing their lips." Equally fresh is the other self-published piece, Adrian Tomine's "Bomb Scare," a story of teenage exploration and alienation told through a 32-page cartoon. Tomine's artwork is never static and the characters come alive, moving seamlessly from panel to panel. Universal alienation is also a central theme in Best Nonrequired Reading. "Generation Exile," by Meenakshi Ganguly, vividly captures the brutal assimilation history of the Chinese. Michael Kamber's "Toil and Temptation," a breathtaking portrait of a Mexican immigrant's journey from Zapotitlan to the Bronx, is a solid example of no-frills journalism. Also part of the displacement theme are reports on Sudanese refugee boys ("The Lost Boys"), and two Afghans who grew up in the same village but now are on opposite sides ("Naji's Taliban Phase"). Head and shoulders above all the writing is "Higher Education," Gary Smith's profile of an African-American basketball coach who comes to an all-white Ohio Amish community. If you are not teary- eyed by the end of this piece you might check for a pulse. The two short pieces from the Onion and the McSweeney's inclusion are less successful and are more of a distraction than a benefit. David Sedaris' "Mr. Popular" is a hilarious tale of his flailing attempt to fit in with the popular crowd, a grade school monarchy of unremarkable kids. "So complete was their power that I actually felt honored when one of them hit me in the mouth with a rock." Other funny moments lie in Seaton Smith's "'Jiving' with Your Teen": "When you master their vocabulary you can finally tell them, in their own language, that the police are at the door." All the more reason for the beleaguered parents of the anthology's target audience to also make this ambitious little volume required reading this fall. Stephen J. Lyons writes "Letters from Mid-life" for austinmama.com. He lives in Monticello, Ill. - - - -
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