Advance Praise

After a dreadful accident, a boy is forced to betray the truth because the safety of his fractured family depends on it. The story runs hot as a pistol all the way through, with characters you can't bear to leave. At a time when so much fiction is chilly, ironic babble, cobbled around ideology, LaMarche's book is a heartfelt offering to the world. Like Hemmingway and Cormac McCarthy before him, LaMarche is writing as men never have before.
- MARY KARR

The debut novel of the year, and one, I expect, for the ages -- as fast, passionate, intense, and virtuosic a first novel as can be imagined. LaMarche is a young master, who writes with urgency and moral force about an America that rarely appears in our literature -- working America, beaten-down America, the secret, ashamed, aggressive America, a place deformed by our belief in power, our insistence on individuality, our obsession with action/violence, our laconicism, our essential loneliness. But-- and this is the real miracle of this book-- LaMarche also shows us the antidote, as his young hero takes an equally American journey toward honesty, forgiveness, and light-- a journey fueled by his native wit and intelligence. Written in a simple, elegant, and contemporary American idiom, compressed and efficient to the bursting point, American Youth is a beautifully executed example of perhaps the most moving story of all: a human being tries to save himself from guilt and darkness. We will, I expect, be hearing from LaMarche for a long time to come--American Youth feels like a very large first footfall from an astonishing new American talent.
- GEORGE SAUNDERS

In crystalline, taut prose, Lamarche offers a boy left rudderless after the simplest of accidents leaves him teetering on the edge of the human circle. Whether he'll fall painfully out or fall mercifully back in is the heart of this honest and uncompromising look at the darker side of growing up.
- BRIAN EVENSON

American Youth is written with great psychological precision and insight. It is a portrait of a society in crisis and decay, but, more important, it is a gripping dramatisation of the relationship between a vulnerable and interesting protagonist and the hard world around him. He is someone on whom nothing is lost; in language both spare and truthful his plight is rendered fascinating and deeply convincing and memorable
- COLM TOIBIN

American Youth is a novel that demonstrates par excellence that the best writing is sometimes the simplest. A story of the individual, a story of America, it is one of those (all too) rare books that has stayed with me long after reading the last page.
- KATE ATKINSON


Reviews

This is one of 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… 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… 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.
-Jerry Stahl, LA Times

In telling the story of New England ninth grader Ted LeClare, LaMarche takes Mitch Albom-like sincerity, holds it arm's length from George Saunders-like deadpan satire, and transports the lot to a gun-crazy America that he refuses to judge. The results make his characters unwittingly sophisticated vessels for the hopes and fears of the post-post-Columbine exurbs. The plot is simple: while showing off his .22, Ted loads the gun; while Ted's back is turned, his schoolmate Kevin Dennison accidentally kills Kevin's younger brother, Bobby. The aftermath includes Ted's being taken up by a group of boys calling themselves the American Youth, teens who spout a debased, quasireligious, gun rights, antidevelopment, NIMBY-like parody of conservative talk show rhetoric. Ted also, at his mother's direction (his father is absent), lies about having loaded the gun. As Ted (referred to as "the boy" most of the time) comes around to telling the truth about what happened, there are detours into bad behavior with the Youth. In vivid set pieces, aimless teens take vigilante action against creeping cookie-cutter housing and enforce a bizarre set of double-standards. Drugs, alcohol and sex fascinate and repel the Youth in equal measure. LaMarche deftly allows his debut to be at once a parable and a dead-on rendering of its time and place.
- Starred Publishers Weekly review

A title this generic suggests that the author is going to paint with a broad brush, but while LaMarche does tackle big issues in his debut-using gun violence as a way into teen alienation, urban-rural conflict, and the nostalgic impulse behind fascism-he does so by painting a deceptively simple picture. In New England, a rural boy shows his gun to two brothers, and one of the brothers accidentally shoots and kills the other. The boy's terrified mother orders him to keep a terrible secret: he loaded the gun. Ostracized at school, the boy joins a group called American Youth, straight-edgers whose main purpose seems to be vandalizing homes in the area's new subdivisions. Beset by parents, police, and peers, the boy turns his anger on himself until a violent release seems inevitable. Although some lines of thought could have been explored more fully, LaMarche's surgically clean prose exposes the full extent of the boy's pain, and as a portrait of young people trapped in the ruptures of our society, this short novel has great power.
- Keir Graff, Booklist

The boy protagonist in Phil LaMarche's roiling debut novel, American Youth, is tough and lonely in the manner of Russell Banks's lost-kid hero in Rule of the Bone. Ted LeClare's detachment from his peers is set against the backdrop of his family's-and the region's-economic dislocation, and LaMarche renders the culturally barren New England landscape with language that is both portentous and propulsive…

Viscerally capturing the profound confusion of adolescence is a delicate endeavor for fiction writers. When LaMarche rises to this challenge with focused compassion, Ted LeClare becomes a heroic portrait of blind (and mute) resilience. His coming-of-age crests not with a promise of respite but with a cold recognition that his struggle-both psychological and corporeal-will 'begin again. . . . Nothing will stop.'"
- Johnny Temple, Bookforum

Phil LaMarche's first novel is so savage it hurts. Still it's a quiet savagery as "American Youth" cuts through what it means to be young and so trapped as almost to be buried alive. Too, given that LaMarche delivers penetrating insight into this country's gun culture, the novel has also become indirectly topical.
- Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News

American Youth is a book that demands to be devoured: a short tale full of suspense. It's best read in dread and in hope-dread and hope that apply not only to Theodore, but to us all in an unstable, well-armed world… LaMarche never preaches; he simply follows that old fashioned rule of writing, "show, don't tell"-to remarkable, moving effect.
- Erica Wagner, New York Observer

Built of spare, solid materials -- dead-on dialogue everywhere and emotional depth charges strategically placed -- it has a timeless, inevitable feel. Phil LaMarche observes boys undergoing the rites of adolescence the way Rick Bass and Jim Harrison investigate the ravages of time on their fathers -- with an unflinching but sympathetic eye, sometimes amused, sometimes ashamed, always astonished.
- Dan Cryer, San Francisco Chronicle

LaMarche takes Hemingway's "hunting and shooting" literary tradition and projects it forward into the world of malls and cable and self-harming, pot-smoking teens. And like both these earlier figures, an apparent artlessness -- short sentences, plain language -- provides cover for intensely conscious literary craft… Anton Chekhov, a writer who looms large behind Hemingway and Carver,considered that it was not the artist's business to solve questions but to answer them correctly. He could have been writing about American Youth when he wrote in a letter to a critic: "You told me once my stories lack an element of protest and that they have neither sympathies or antipathies. But doesn't the story protest against lying from start to finish? Isn't that ideology?" …what is beyond doubt is that LaMarche is a true artist: beautifully concerned with words and, mindful of Chekhov and his own illustrious forebears, determined not to parrot the dull binaries that pass for thought in the public realm.
- Geordie Williamson, The Australian

Phil LaMarche's debut novel sets itself down in a small New Hampshire town during an economic downturn and refuses to budge until it has gnawed every trope of traditional American fiction to the bone. Until it's masticated every cell of Dreiser, Steinbeck and the grandsons: Banks and Lehane. Until there's nothing left but pure story. But from this pure story, he creates something that's been missing for a while: innocence. This is not to be confused with the naïveté that stinks up too much of American film and television, but it's definitely not the relatively healthier stink of cynicism from the growing compost heap of unread realism.
- Juliet Waters, Montreal Mirror

Emotionally powerful . . . Ted is a sensitively drawn protagonist, whose reaction to the situation he finds himself in is achingly real.
- The Dallas Morning News

Phil LaMarche's haunting debut, 'American Youth', is a firecracker of a novel that places teenage angst, economical strife and gun control under a microscope. The result: a well-written, yet frighteningly realistic, depiction of what could happen when society looks the other way… With a domino narration--events keep slamming into one another--and a bone-chilling voice devoid of warmth and prejudice, "Youth" is as powerful as it is bone-chillingly plausible.
- Nicholas Addison Thomas, Fredericksburg VA Free Lance-Star

A powerful and compelling first novel, American Youth brings readers back to the awkwardness and danger of being a teenager. Author Phil LaMarche has created a fast-paced and seamless tale of a teenage boy coping with the beginning of high school after a fatal firearms accident in his home kills his friend… And despite all the teenage awkwardness, it is Ted's dry and introspective narrative that keeps the reader riveted, unable to give up hope or put down the book.
- Melanie Owen, The Calgary Herald

LaMarche breaks new ground exploring adolescent angst in this crisply written novel of gun culture and violence… what sets "American Youth" apart from other books that have explored similar themes -- beyond LaMarche's writing, which is crisp and propulsive -- is that it presents a world in which the teen years are fraught not only with varying degrees of emotional violence but actual violence, as well.
- Ethan Rutherford, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

Phil LaMarche's superbly edgy portrait of individual infighting and a community's uneasy, prideful attitude towards gun culture and nationhood produces a brief, yet spacious novel. His future as a writer aches with possibility.
- Catherine Taylor, The Guardian

Creepy, suspenseful, and written in ferociously taut prose, it's a must-read novel.
- Daily Candy

Debut novelist LaMarche writes compellingly about small-town mores, and the pacing is brisk as Teddy's life spins out of control….a solid start for a new novelist
- Kirkus Review

…superbly written… An understated portrait of a darkly divided America, it's as piercing and deadly as a bullet.
- London Metro

The book takes on the Clash of Civilisations at the heart of American culture… At the same time it's a coming of age novel that reminded me of Holden Caulfield and has some sparkling and funny adolescent sex scenes - all that fumbling and groping and trepidation… I liked the boy but he scared me. He was a boy like any other boy, in a world unlike any other. A world on a collision course with itself and anyone who dare get in the way. American Youth creeps up on you long after you've finished the last page..."
- justclick.co.uk