At the age of seven or thereabout he sees
through his parents and characterizes them in a phrase. At
fourteen he sees through his education and begins to dodge it. At
eighteen he sees through morality and steps over it. At twenty he
loses respect for his home town, and at twenty-one discovers that
our social and economic system is ridiculous. At twenty-three his
story ends because the author has run through society to date and
does not know what to do next. Life is ahead of the hero, and
presumably a new society of his own making. This latter, however,
does not appear in any of the books, and for good reasons.
In brief, this literature of the youngest generation is a
literature of revolt, which is not surprising, but also a
literature characterized by a minute and painful examination of
environment. Youth, in the old days, when it rebelled, escaped to
romantic climes or adventurous experience from a world which some
one else had made for it. That is what the hacks of the movies and
the grown-up children who write certain kinds of novels are still
doing. But true youth is giving us this absorbed examination of
all possible experiences that can come to a boy or girl who does
not escape from every-day life, this unflattering picture of a
world that does not fit, worked out with as much evidence as if
each novel were to be part of a brief of youth against society.
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