Many years ago, it was generally acknowledged that sociology had replaced the novel as a social microscope for examining contemporary mores and behavior. Whereas readers in the 19th century looked to writers like Balzac, Dickens, and Trollope for critical insight into the intricacies of social patterns, by the mid-20th century we were looking instead to reports by sociologists to gain similar understanding of our way of life.
Those who wanted to gain insight into adolescent culture in the middle of the 20th century could certainly find intriguing novels, like John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but such books portrayed highly unusual situations rather than realistic descriptions of the lives of teenagers. For anyone concerned to understand adolescence, a more reliable source was James Coleman’s The Adolescent Society. (For Coleman’s own words, see “The Adolescent Society,” this issue, pp. 40-43.) High-school students, he found, had created their own subculture, one that was anti-intellectual and materialistic, wherein they honored athletic prowess, looks, and popularity, but not academic achievement.
Nearly a half century has passed since the publication of Coleman’s landmark study, and no sociological work about today’s youth has taken its place. Oddly enough, it may be necessary to turn again to fiction to find a representation of youth culture that describes how much has changed since Coleman’s era. Two recent books offer a searing critique of adolescent life today, and both are worthy of attention for the portrait that they draw of the culture in which young people are immersed.
Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep describe life in, respectively, an elite college and an elite boarding school. Both are stories about girls who arrive in an academic setting where they feel out of place because of their family’s social status. Lee Fiora attends the highly selective prep school Ault as a scholarship student. Charlotte Simmons is a scholarship student at a Duke-like university called Dupont. Fiora’s family is solidly middle class, yet gauche and awkward among the upper-class parents at Ault. Simmons’s family is from the mountains, and they are uneducated, dirt-poor, ignorant, and baffled by the sophisticated culture that their daughter Charlotte has joined.
