BOOKS
Tribal Customs
A TRIBE APART: A JOURNEY INTO THE H EART OF AMERICAN
ADOLESCENCE.
By
Patricia Hersch.
Fawcett Columbine.
$25.00
It
took me longer to read Patricia Hersch's
A Tribe Apart: A Journey Into the
Heart
if
American Adolescence
than it did to read
VUzr and Peace,
a book which
is considerably longer but hard to put down. Hersch's book is hard to pick
up. I repeatedly asked myself, nagged by my obligation to review it, why it
inspired in me such a peculiar combination of boredom and depression,
and finally reached the conclusion that both the author's sensibility and the
minds of her subjects are so empty of anything but the banal and the most
received of current wisdom as to make one want to get up and leave any
room in which they are holding forth. In this case the rooms are chapters,
and there seem to be too many of them.
It is Patricia Hersch's contention, in this report of several years she
spent entering into close communion with a group of middle-class "cul–
turally diverse" teenagers, that they suffer from a lack of adult attention. In
minutely detailed accounts of their conversations and observations of their
behavior, she documents her thesis that today's adolescents, more isolated
and more unsupervised than previous generations, and in a more amor–
phous and unpredictable society, are growing up without the interaction
with adult role models that should prepare them for taking on the respon–
sibilities of adult life. Fair enough. But, one cannot help asking, as one
makes one's way through this book, what do the adults in these young
people's bves have to offer them in the way of "role modeling"?
Parents? Well, the worst of them in the cases of the eight teenagers
whose lives Hersch follows in detail are abusive or emotionally or physi–
cally absent (mothers who work full time, parents who are divorced). The
best of them are encouraging and supportive. Hersch set out to "immerse
[herself] in the adolescent way of seeing" and has done such a good job
that she becomes indistinguishable from her subjects. She refers not to
mothers and fathers but to "moms" and "dads," is given to the usage of the
ubiquitous "like" in place of "as," and remains scrupulously nonjudgmen–
tal, reveling in the young people's appreciation of her unfailing willingness
to listen to them for hours on end. She has bought into the value placed
by our therapeutic culture on "understanding." She offers no judgment
when she hears about teenage abortions, drug deabng, or defacement of
pubbc property by graffiti "artists." She wants us to join her inside the
minds of her subjects, but to what end? In real therapy, the goal is change.
It does not stop with the act of listening. The adult privy to these often
